OUR COMMON SCHOOL 
SYSTEM. 



UNirOEM VOLUMES BY THE SAME ATJTHOB. 



Published at $1.50 each. 



SUMMER REST, 

SKIRMISHES AND SKETCHES. 

A NEW A TMO SPHERE. 

STUMBLING-BLOCKS, 

GALA-DAYS. 

COUNTRY LIVING AND COUNTRY THINKING. 

WOOL GATHERING. 

WOMAN S WRONGS. 

SERMONS TO THE CLERGY. 

FIRST LOVE IS BEST. 



OUR 

COMMON SCHOOL 
SYSTEM. 

BY 

GAIL HAMILTON. 



6v 



''.//c5..../.^..«..L.cl| 



bostonY 
estes & l a uri at, 

301 Washington Street. 






Copyright 

iS8o. 

EsTEs & Lauriat. 



CONTENTS. 



Equalizing Wages . . 
High Schools . . . • . 

Industrial Schools . • . 

Normal Schools^ 

The Form of Blanks 

Examination under the Microscope 

The Supervisory Fever 

Milk for Babes 

Official Supervision and Personal 

Supervision 
On the World-wide Sea . 
Purification by Supervision 
The Foolishness of Teaching 
Corporal Punishment 
Salary of Teachers 
The Degradation of the Teacher 
For Substance of Doctrine 



PAGB. 

9 

21 

47 
67 
89 

^33 
159 
173 

187 
203 
219 

227 

255 
267 
289 
32s 



EQUALIZING WAGES. 



SUGGESTIONS 
CONCERNING OUR SCHOOLS. 



D>*iC 



EQUALIZING WAGES. 

IN a city famous for its schools, a discussion sprang 
up concerning methods of education. Among other 
suggestions, one writer says: — 

" If the question of salary were left to a vote of the people, 
the pedagogues, instead of getting more, would be obliged to 
be satisfied with less. To be plain, they are made of the very 
same materials as laborers, and do not require any more to 
sustain life; nor are they a whit more deserving; nor should 
they get a cent more for their time or services. And as to the 
female teachers, it would be hard to make most people believe 
that they should receive for their services and time so much 
more than their equally-deserving and hard- worked sisters, the 
tailoress and work-gii"ls of the various workshops and facto- 
ries in our midst, who are obliged to work, and diligently, too, 
from early morn till night, for about one-half what the school- 
teachers get for only four or five hours. 

" The truth is, the people are beginning to think, that as a 
bank-teller, a city treasurer, or other high dignitary receives 

9 



lo . Equalizing Wages, 

three thousand dollars, or at that rate, per annum, a laborer 
at anj business ought to have just as much. . . . The over- 
seeing of a job, the duties of a cashier, or the calling of a 
teacher, is less laborious, and men are not so foolish as to 
neglect fitting themselves therefor, rather than be obliged to 
take hold of a pickaxe, a shovel, or a wheelbarrow. 

" Salaries must come down. Female teachers ought not to 
getover four hundred dollars per annum, and, for masters, one 
dollar per hour, which, for twenty-six hours will give them 
twenty-six dollars per week ; and then they must not be paid 
for vacations, which, indeed, they have no more right to than 
any laborer in the city's employ." 

This, to be sure, is the view of ignorance ; but igno- 
rance has a claim to be heard. Ignorance votes ; 
ignorance pays taxes ; ignorance has rights which all 
men are bound to respect ; and even to ignorance we 
should give fair hearing and courteous consideration. 

The gist of this writer's argument is that teachers 
should be, and be considered, on a level with all other 
laborers. He thinks that the master who teaches his 
children should be paid in the same way as the man 
who spades his garden or shovels sand on his railroad. 
He would have the schoolmistress on exactly the same 
grade as the maid-of-all-work in his kitchen. Or 
rather, since the female teacher is to be paid but four 
hundred dollars, while the price of ordinary board in 
his town is not less than seven dollars per week and 
often more, and the wages of the maid-of-all-work is 



Equalizifig Wages. II 

three dollars a week besides her board, he chooses his 
teacher to be of a considerably lower grade than his 
maid-of-all-work. 

This change of base may be a profitable and desira- 
ble one ; but, before we make a violent attempt to brin^ 
it about, let us see exactly where it leads us. 

To reduce the salaries of teachers to those of labor- 
ers would in the first place materially lessen taxation ; 
and this is a result always welcome. But when the 
rank and the pay are those of laborers, the duty will 
of course devolve upon laborers. The schools will be 
taught by men and women who have the education and 
qualifications of dirt-shovellers and chambermaids. I 
say nothing against these classes. There is no dis- 
grace in shovelling dirt or sweeping floors. The best 
men and women in the world have made these actions 
fine. But fitness for such work is not hard to get or 
rare to find ; and when you have decreed that you want 
in your schools only the very same materials as labor- 
ers, and that your teachers shall be paid not a cent 
more than laborers, what have you a right to expect 
but that you shall have laborers for your teachers ? 

But there are scores of men in every village, and 
hundreds in every town, and thousands in every city, 
who will not be satisfied to have their children so 
taught. The consequence will be that the rich and 
the intelligent will take their children out of the public 



X2 Equalizing- Wages. 

schools and put them in private schools. There will 
thus be a division between the rich and the poor, be- 
tween the educated and the unlearned, — a division con- 
stantly deepening and widening. It will then be the 
interest of the rich and well-to-do to have the public 
schools as cheap and poor as possible. On the present 
system our public schools are a most democratic insti- 
tution. The poor are educated at the expense of the 
rich. Elegant school-houses, costly apparatus, educated 
and accomplished teachers are just as much at the ser- 
vice of the hod-carrier as of the millionnaire. The mer- 
chant's boy at the most expensive private school in the 
land is no better fitted for college than is the son of the 
washerwoman at the high school, without money and 
without price. As a result and a very desirable result, 
the merchant's son, the millionnaire's son, if he be bright 
and clever and honorable, does not often go to the private 
school when the high school is accessible, but studies 
in the high school of his own city and graduates by the 
side of his clever though penniless colleague. Thus 
the rich and the poor meet together on common ground 
with common interests, an4 with a respect or a con- 
tempt for each other formed on mutual knowledge, on 
fair comparison, and honorable competition, — a union 
which is of the greatest practical value to both in after- 
life. Take away your educated teachers and your cor- 
responding salaries, and you have changed all that. 



Equalizing Wages, 13 

The people will have cheap schools to their heart's 
content. The rich, that is the heavy tax-payers, will at 
great expense send their own children to private schools, 
and will, of course, desire the public schools to be as 
inexpensive as possible. The children of the poor will 
be, as at present, confined to the public schools, where 
they will receive such instruction as Bridget and Sandy 
may be able to afford. But is the outlook encouraging? 
Would this state of things be considered an improve- 
ment upon the present ? 

Glance at the reasons why our protestant does not 
think this state of things would follow. He thinks that 
the calling of city-treasurer, the overseer, the cashier, 
the teacher, is less laborious than that of the manual 
laborer, and men and women will resort to it on that 
account even though the wages are reduced to those of 
the laborer. A man will teach at a dollar an hour, 
rather than xiig at a dollar an hour. A woman will 
teach for two dollars and a half a week, rather than 
make beds at three, because the work is so much easier. 
This might be true if the writer could only bring the 
whole Avorld around to his way of thinking. His own 
standard of value is time. He does not think prepara- 
tion of any account. He does not put brain-work any 
higher than muscular work. He does not allow any 
weight to responsibility, or any price to rarity. He. 
mentions indeed few cases ; but his argument applies 



14 Equalizing Wages, 

equally to all. The president of a railroad* the judge 
of the Supreme Court, the clergyman, the trustee, the 
business magnate, spends no more hours a day in his 
office than the schoolmaster in his schoolroom ; and 
his pay should be the same. He is made of the same 
materials as laborers, he does not require any more to 
sustain life, and he should not get a cent more for his 
time or services. Yet among all people who are con- 
ducting business in their own interests, on their own 
responsibility, for their own emolument, there is a wide- 
spread prejudice in favor of inequality of service and 
of wages. A bank is willing to pay one man three 
thousand dollars a year and to another man it will not 
pay a penny. A congregation will cheerfully, nay, 
eagerly, beg one clergyman to receive five thousand 
dollars a year from them ; and to another clergyman 
they will only give leave to withdraw. Two women 
will spend the same number of hours over a story; and 
for one the publishers pay gladly thousands of dollars ; 
and the other brings only three cents a pound from the 
rag-peddlers. A gentleman in mercantile circles said 
a few days ago of another gentleman who had J:empo- 
rarily retired from business for health and recreation, 
that twenty houses would gladly pay him ten thousand 
dollars a year on account of his well-known trustworthi- 
ness. A woman lately refused a salary of two thousand 
dollars as teacher in a private school ; and another, 
twelve hundred dollars as writer in a child's paper. 



Equalizing Wages, 1 5 

All these things must be changed before the screw- 
can be applied to school-teachers. Before a " peda- 
gogue " will be '■' satisfied with less " than he now gets, 
you must make him " obliged " to be satisfied. Bring 
the pressure to bear on him now, and he will immedi- 
ately slip from under it. Reduce the woman's salary 
from eight hundred to four hundred, and if she is worth 
anything, if she has ability, if she earned the eight 
hundred, she leaves her school. The ones you would 
retain would be only those who could do nothing else, 
and nothing more. It is true that for every one that 
resigns, there would be twenty new candidates. The 
place of every teacher in the United States could 
doubtless be filled at four hundred dollars a year : so 
the presidency of every bank and every railroad, the 
occupancy of every pulpit, and every post of honor and 
trust in the country could doubtless find possessors 
at a salary of two thousand dollars a year. Yet be- 
sotted corporations persist in paying five, ten, fifteen, 
twenty, thousand dollars for choice. There seems to 
be a blind, foolish conspiracy between firms and the 
men they want. The first consents to pay, and the sec- 
ond assumes to demand, twenty times the sum paid to 
other laborers, irrespective of the fact that the high- 
priced wretch eats no more, and weighs no more, and 
works no more hours, than the laborer. 

Nay, when we go even among our hard-worked sis- 



1 6 Equalizing Wages. 

ters, the tailoresses, we find the same sort of inequality. 
The deft and nimble artisan* who can make a suit of 
clothes, or fashion an elegant costume, or maintain a 
costly establishment, is far more abundantly remuner- 
ated than her equally-deserving and hard-worked sister, 
the slopwork-maker. The cook who has mastered the 
intricacies of French dishes works fewer hours than she 
who barely knows how to boil and bake, and who waits 
upon herself and the whole house besides. Yet the 
former receives fifty dollars a month, and the latter 
twelve. 

Our economist must change all this before he can 
bring his reform into working-order. It is of no use for 
a city to expect to secure service at one-half or one-third 
the market-price. A woman may prefer teaching rather 
than sewing without regard to salary ; but public schools 
can never retain thousand-dollar teachers at four-hun- 
dred-dollar prices, as long as private schools abound, 
glad to take them at a thousand dollars. Of this re- 
former it may be truly said, his field is the world. He 
has to remodel npt only every class but every industry 
of society. He must overturn and overturn, till every 
business-principle is reconstructed. It is not only such 
"high dignitaries " as tellers and treasurers, who are to 
be converted, but "the people" themselves, in whose 
behalf he girds himself to battle. For while he declares 
with one breath that if the question of salary were 



Equalizing Wages. i*j 

left to "the people," the "pedagogue" would fare ill, 
in the next he asserts that " the people " are beginning 
to think all laborers should fare as well as the bank- 
teller ; that is, the same " people " at the same time are 
levelling pedagogues down to laborers, and levelling 
laborers up to cityitreasurers. At which pleasant little 
seesaw, our political economist may safely be left, with 
the assurance that the game will last him "during the 
remainder of his natural life. 

2» 



HIGH SCHOOLS. 



HIGH SCHOOLS. 

IJUT the discontent of ignorance is a warning. 
JLJ While it is impossible that children should be 
educated too much, it is possible that they shall be 
educated unsymmetrically. It is possible that they 
shall be educated to dependence and not to indepen- 
dence. It is possible that too much money is spent 
for some things and too little for others. 

In spite of the money, talent, enthusiasm and pride, 
enlisted in our public-school system, is there not danger 
that we lose sight of the object ? For education is a 
means, not an end. It is a wonderful and a charming 
sight to see the orderly regiments of boys and girls, on 
dress-parade, drilled into uniformity, marching and 
countermarching with a rhythm of musical motion ; 
and when I attend examinations, and see, besides this, 
the wonderful manipulations upon the blackboard, and 
the problems solved, the learning so featly rolled off 
from girlish lips and boyish fingers, I marvel to think 
there was a time when I knew as much as they do. 
And if the object of the schools be to have and display 

(21) 



22 High Schools, 

a perfectly- working machine, the drill and the discip- 
line have splendidly succeeded. If what the republic 
needs is girls and boys familiar with abstruse science, 
here they are made to order, at the shortest notice, and 
on the most reasonable terms. I confess I think our 
American predilections have almost universally been in 
this direction. Education has been the watchword and 
talisman of our country. And a noble watchword 
it is. But we find ourselves confronted by a practical 
difficulty to which we cannot close our eyes. We 
have a country largely undeveloped, with resources 
vastly in excess of the means to unlock them, laborers 
scarce, and labor high, and, on the other side, hosts of 
young men and young women with nothing to do. 
The mechanical trades are open to them, call to them 
indeed with abundant work and abundant wages ; but 
they do not hear, or do not heed the call. They are 
willing to go into stores, to be book-keepers, copyists, 
clerks; but to learn a trade, to serve an apprentice- 
ship, — this they are not willing to do. They have 
been through the grammar schools, and partially or 
wholly through the high schools. They are, in some 
sense, highly educated. They are familiar with draw- 
ing : they have a pleasant, if superficial, acquaintance 
with science. By the aid of a dictionary, they can 
read one or two languages. They have good manners, 
refined tastes, correct habits ; and, naturally, they wish 



High Schools. 23 

to bring their acquisitions to market. They desire an 
occupation and a society in which their accomplish- 
ments will be employed and appreciated. French and 
Latin and the higher mathematics seem to them thrown 
away on a stone-mason. It is true the book-keeper 
hardly needs or uses them more ; but the book-keeper 
wears a coat and clean linen at his work, while the 
stone-mason must protect himself with blouse and 
over-all. The book-keeper associates with well-dressed 
and intelligent persons, while the stone-mason asso- 
ciates with over-alls like his own and with intelligence 
often inferior. So the girl and the boy pass months 
and years in waiting for some genteel occupation, 
while useful and homely though perfectly honorable 
work lies all around them. A clergyman in a rural city 
was querying, not long ago, as to what could be done 
with the unemployed intelligence and education of the 
town; and iit the same place a most gentlemanlike' 
and intelligent carpenter, well on in middle age, told 
me that he was the youngest carpenter in town who 
had served full apprenticeship. The trade was passing 
into the hands of an inferior class of men, who had no 
class-pride, cared little for skill or excellence in their 
work, but learned just enough to make a show, then 
set up for themselves, and were earning great wages 
for inferior, shoddy work. 

It is small use to blame the young people for this 



24 High Schools. 

No one wants to descend in the scale, and especially 
does not a young person with his imagination all aglow. 
It is simply that society has educated him above his 
condition. But there, unhappily, it leaves him. It 
fits him for pleasant, intellectual work ; but it does not 
provide that work. It unfits him for coarse and com- 
mon work, almost for fine, if mechanical work ; but it 
leaves him dependent upon that. It gives him the 
education of the rich ; but it gives him none of the 
immunities of the rich. He has all the tastes and 
aspirations of wealth, but all the necessities and limi- 
tations of poverty. Is there not a touch of cruelty in 
this ? 

Is it not possible, then, that the ver}' point of which 
we are most proud is the very point in which we are 
weak ? We boast that in our high schools we give to 
the poor just as much and just as good as we give to 
the rich ; but why give anything to either ? What 
right has government to bestow luxury of education 
any more than luxury of dress .'' What right has it to 
tax the public for a high school education any more 
than for a college education "i The primary school 
education, the common education, it does not give but 
require. It recognizes a certain degree of education 
as requisite to intelligence and good citizenship. A 
rudimental knowledge of reading, writing, geography, 
and arithmetic, it, as a general thing, believes necessary 



High Schools. i^ 

to give, the republic a firm foundation. It is therefore 
proper that government should furnish the means to 
secure what it requires for citizenship. It does this, 
not directly for the citizen, but directly for the sake of the 
republic, and through that, indirectly, to the citizen. It 
does not furnish a boon: it demands a preparation. It 
does not make the citizen a proletary, but a participator. 

Beyond this is it right or wise to go ? When a town 
has attained a certain population, it is required by law 
to establish a high school ; but nobody is required by 
law to go to it. In no town nor village is there any 
truant-officer to force children of any age into the high 
school. No parent is fined for not sending his boy. 
No high school diploma is demanded at the polls. It 
is thereby conceded that a high school education is not 
necessary to the safety of the republic. Why then 
should law enforce a supply of gratuitous education any 
more than it enforces gratuitous carpets and carriages'? 
W'e have not a paternal government. 

But education is so much more important and enno- 
bling than any other luxury ! The height of the higher 
classes determines the height of the lower. The more 
learned are the learned classes, the more intelligent 
are the unlearned. The poor are thus helped along 
a path which, but for this, they could not tread. Edu- 
cation, by this means, is not confined to the rich ; but 
rich and poor meet together to the advantage of both. 



26 High Schools. 

True; but everything is worth what it costs. The 
education which any boy or girl takes because it is 
presented to him is not to be compared with that which 
he takes because he will have it. The young man wlio 
is lounging about town waiting for a chance to copy 
deeds, or transfer figures from one paper to another, or 
pull down parcels of silk from shelf to counter, or any. 
thing else light and easy, is not the boy who has gone 
through fire and water to get his education. That boy 
had a definite design ; and he will accomplish it. He 
is educated, not because he lived near a high school, 
but because he had the divine hunger and thirst for 
knowledge ; and knowledge, at the price he paid for it, 
is solid and marketable property to its possessor. 

The question is not of education or of ignorance. 
It is whether the money of the people shall be used for 
the education of all or whether it shall be used for the 
education of the few. I think it better for the public 
money to be used upon the schools that educate the 
many and not upon the schools that educate the few. 
Yet it is unfair to raise the cry of aristocracy against the 
present system, with all its complications, high schools 
included. In some respects it is the most democratic of 
institutions. It is not only true that all the schools are 
open to all the people ; but it is also true that the rich 
are taxed far beyond their proportion of direct benefit. 
If a man is poor, his share of the high school tax is almost 



High Schools. 27 

imperceptible \ but he can send his twelv? children to 
the high school, where they will receive just as warm 
a welcome and just as careful culture as the one 
daughter of the rich man. And this is wholesome ; a 
very decided benefit arising from our present system 
is the mingling and measuring against each other of 
different classes of society, — a benefit which inures' 
quite as much to the rich as to the poor. Our present 
system, costly and elaborate though it be, is in theory 
far more democratic than a more simple and inexpen- 
sive one. It puts a costly education within reach of 
the poorest boy. 

The Governor of New York has never summoned me 
to armed interference in his cause, and I certainly do 
riot feel that moral responsibility for New York which 
I feel for Massachusetts. Nevertheless, logic is logic 
even in a New York Democrat and fallacy is fallacy 
even in a School Journal. When the Governor says in 
his message : '* To the extent of giving to evei-y child in 
the state a good common school education, sufficient to 
enable him or her to understand and perform the duties 
of American citizenship, and to carry on intelligently 
and successfully the ordinary labors of life, the common 
schools are and should be objects of the deepest con- 
cern to the whole community," I understand and applaud. 
But when the New York School Journal replies to the 
Governor that " Our Common School System does not 



zS High Schools. 

even pretend, in any of its departments, to go beyond 
this limit;" I do not understand; or if I understand, 
I do not agree. 

The School Journal enforces its declaration by ask- 
ing " What is it to understand and perform the duties 
of American citizenship ? One of those duties is to 
read and understand the laws which he (?) has to obey. 
Another is to be able to make those laws. A third is 
to'be capable of administering and executing them. 

"All natural born male citizens are eligible to all 
offices, even the Presidency ; and all naturalized male 
citizens are eligible to every office, with a very few 
exceptions. . . . 

" In a free State, one of the great objects of the free 
common school is to qualify the whole body of citizens 
for the performance of every duty that may fall to 
them by reason of their citizenship." 

It seems to me that this " Educational " writer, in an 
'' Educational " Journal, utterly misapprehends the 
whole scope and drift not only of our public school 
system but of our whole system of government. Pre- 
paring every child for the duties of citizenshiiD, he 
treats as one and the same thing with preparing every 
child for every duty that may fall to him while he is a 
citizen. That he means this in the fullest sense is 
attested by his illustration which embraces all offices, 
from the lowest to the highest. But a moment's atten- 



High Schools. 29 

tion to the meaning of words must convince him of the 
incorrectness of his declaration. Is it any object of 
the free common school to qualify the whole body of 
citizens to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or 
General of the Army, or Admiral in the Navy, or an 
Expert yellow-fever Committee-man? Our free-school 
system never pretends to this office. Our " Educator " 
is wrong at both ends of his argument. He puts into 
our Free School system many more objects than it 
ever aspired to, and he takes away from this system 
a great deal which it has actually attempted. The 
Common-School System does not undertake to qualify 
all citizens for all duties, and it does undertake to 
qualify them beyond the point which the State requires. 
Some States demand an Educational test for suffrage ; 
some demand education through a term of years. No 
State demands a High-School education, yet the Sys- 
tem undertakes to give it. What the State does under- 
take and what it should undertake is to give to every 
child a fair start in the race ; to demand of every citizen 
education enough to enable him to perform the ordi- 
nary duties — not the extraordinary duties — of American 
citizens. It demands intelligence enough to do what 
is the duty of every man ; not training enough to do 
what is required of only a few men. It furnishes to 
every child a basis for education. The Public-School 
System gives to every child a knowledge of reading, 



30 High . Schools, 

writing, and the elements of arithmetic, grammar and 
geography. This is the foundation of the whole super- 
structure. It may even be said that when a child has 
learned to read and write, he is educated. The world 
of science is open to him. All the rest is in his own 
hands. 

It is true, that the High School is, in theory, open to 
all ; but actually, it is only the very few, who can and do 
take advantage of it. Of every hundred pupils, who 
attend the lower schools, statistics show that not more 
than five, in many places, not more than three, attend 
the High School. The majority get no benefit from the 
High Schools, other than that indirect benefit which 
they get equally from private academies and colleges. 
They yet reap, indeed, disadvantage ; for too often the 
instruction in the lower schools is shaped, not to the 
greatest good of the great number who are to find their 
only schooling in these schools, but to the demands of 
those who are to go into the High School. The 
Grammar School aims to fit pupils for the High School. 
It shapes its course of study for the five pupils who 
will graduate at the High School. It ought to fit 
pupils for entering into active life, intelligent. It 
ought to shape its course of instruction for the ninety- 
five or ninety-seven who will have no course of 
instruction except that which the Grammar Schools 
furnish. The High School may offer to the poor the 



High Schools, 31 

same education as to the rich ; but the poor do not 
take it. They cannot take it. The poor cannot 
afford the time that it requires. -The poor must be at 
work earning their -own living, when they are old 
enough to go to the High School. The great majority 
of those who attend the High Schools are from the 
well-to-do classes, who are able to educate their 
children themselves, in the higher branches. A large 
majority of the High School pupils are boys and girls 
who have no especial rage for learning, who have no 
especial necessity for labor, who are in the High School 
because it is a pleasant and profitable way of passing 
the years of their youth. If the High School did not 
exist, a good many of them would be equally well 
educated at private schools, a good many of them 
would be learning useful trades, a very few of them 
would be resolutely working their way through a liberal 
education ; just as many would render distinguished 
service to the State, just as many would illustrate 
advanced thought and shed down radiance upon the 
lower ranks. As it is, the State does neither one thing 
nor another. It does not confine itself to bestowing 
upon all the education that it requires of all. Nor 
does it bestow upon the few whom it selects for especial 
training anything to be compared to the education 
bestowed by private academies and colleges. It com- 
plicates the school system, increases its expense, and 



33 High Schools. ^ 

exposes it to hostility, and after all, leaves its few ^ 
beneficiaries far below, ridiculously below the pupils 
of private institutions.. Every argument that applies to | 
the State support of High Schools applies equally to 
the State support of colleges. If the object of common 
schools is "to qualify the whole body of citizens for 
the performance of any and every duty that may fall to 
them by reason of their citizenship," including the 
competent discharge of all the duties of " all offices, 
even the Presidency," then the common-school system 
is simply imbecile in stopping short with the High 
School.' The High School is grotesquely impotent to 
do any such thing, and our Common-School System 
should go on to establish Colleges, Law Schools, 
Medical Schools, and all universities, in the widest 
scope of that term. Our fathers were wiser in their 
generation than the sons. They began with the 
college. If we are to be controlled by their acts, 
instead of being influenced by their spirit, we must 
adopt into our Common-School System all institutions 
of learning whatever. 

The founders of this country — those founders who 
made this country worth living in, the New England 
fathers — set college and common school side by side. 
In 1635, free schools were recognized by law in Massa- 
chusetts. In 1636, Harvard College was instituted. 
It was not till 1642 that the General Assembly ordered 



High Schools. 33 

that every village of fifty families should have a school 
in which reading and writing should be taught ; and 
that every township of 100 families should support a 
grammar-school where Latin and Greek should be 
taught. In 1639, schools were supported by tax in 
Hartford and New Haven : in 1650, the first code of 
Connecticut required parents and guardians to cause 
their children to be taught to read and to learn the 
catechism ; required, as in Massachusetts, every fifty 
householders to establish a school, ^nd every 100 house- 
holders to establish a grammar-school. In 1700, the 
Connecticut and New Haven colonies withdrew their 
support from Harvard and united in forming a college 
of their own. The common school, the high school, 
the college, advanced with equal step ; but all these 
were far nearer to the private schools of our own day 
than to the public schools. Our fathers were not legis- 
lating for the great nation which we have ^ecome, but 
for the small religious society into which they had 
organized themselves. Their college was a theological 
seminary. They were establishing a religious com- 
munity for themselves and for their children. They had 
only themselves to look to for support. Outside of 
them was a wilderness peopled with savages. They 
founded their schools from the same motives of self- 
preservation that made them build their houses. There 
were no schools anywhere to which they could send their 



34 High Schools. 

children ; they must either establish schools or their 
children must grow up in ignorance. They established 
schools, and established them in such a way as should 
most equably diffuse the cost and most easily meet the 
convenience of the community. Their schools were 
religious, like our Sunday-schools. They were, in fact, 
more like the parochial schools of the Roman Catholics, 
of which we disapprove, than like the actual public 
schools which we have established. 

" After God had carried us safe to New England, and 
we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for 
our livelihood, reared convenient places for God's wor- 
ship, and settled the civil government, one of the first 
things we longed for and looked after was to advance 
learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave 
an illiterate ministry to Mie churches." The same au- 
thority which established and supported the schools 
for reading and writing established and supported the 
classical grammar schools and the college. Harvard 
was founded and named by the State. It belonged to 
the colony just as the primary school belonged to the 
colony, and it was established for the express and ex- 
pressed purpose of promoting piety and godliness as 
well as knowledge. 

It is idle, it is illogical, it is the mark of an undisci- 
plined mind, to demand the maintenance of high 
schools as a continuance of the practice of our fathers. 



High Schools. 35 

Their devotion to learning should animate us, but their 
strict adherency to common sense should also stimu- 
late us to emulation. The method of their devotion 
was dictated by their circumstances. We also should 
adapt ourselves to our circumstances, not to theirs. 
We are amply furnished with academies and colleges 
endowed by private munificence, private benevolence, 
private ambition, open to all. The abolition of high 
schools would not be a blow struck at education, for 
there would be schools remaining just as good, and 
ample for all who should seek them ; and many of these 
schools, and many of the best of these schools, are so 
cheap that no boy need be, and no resolute boy would 
be, deterred by the cost from entering them. Those 
who have persistency enough to use their education to 
advantage in after life, have persistency enough to gain 
education in early years. Why should the State depart 
from the simple principle of giving to every child, of 
forcing upon every child, sufficient education to enable 
him to become a good citizen, and stop far short of the 
education required to make him learned ? Why should 
it provide him with education that rather unfits than 
fits him for a trade, yet does not, and does not pretend 
to fit him for the ministry ? 

The Rev. Joseph Cook, advocating high schools with 
characteristic courtesy and modesty, designates those 
who oppose high schools as the froth and dregs of 



36 H^^J^ Schools. 

society, and stigmatizes this opposition as the work 
of a foreign priesthood. Only a mind unaccustomed 
or disinclined to discrimination could so confound the 
issue. It is possible, but it is not logical, to confuse 
common schools and high schools, and to assume that 
opposition to the one is opposition to the other — that 
the disestablishment of high schools and the establish- 
ment of parochial schools are part and parcel of 
the same movement. The two questions are two 
questions, and not one. 

■ ''High schools," says Mr. Joseph Cook, "are the 
homes of the great middle class ; primary education is 
not enough. We must bring the masses up to a point 
where they can guide their own studies. Common- 
school education does not fit one to regulate his own 
reading." Yet even this novel argument for high 
schools fails before the fact, that we do not get "the 
masses" into the high schools after we establish them ! 
The high school only plucks from three to five out 
"of the masses" to guide their studies, while the 
remaining ninety-five are left -to regulate their own 
reading just as if there were no high schools at all. 
Nor is this high school education shaped merely or 
chiefly to the needs of those fev; of the masses who 
will go to no higher school, but largely to the still 
fewer who will go from the high school to the college. 
Another evil, and a most undemocratic one, is that 



High Schools. 37 

the best teachers, the most highly educated and the 
most highly paid, are not put into the primary schools, 
where all the children have the benefit of their culture, 
but into the high schools, where only three or five per 
cent, of the children come in contact with them. That 
is, instead of giving the best advantages to those who 
have the most ne^d of them, we give them to those 
who have the least. The child who can devote only 
the few years of early infancy to mental pursuits, we 
put off with a half-educated or not educated teacher, 
while the best gifts are bestowed upon those who can 
be furnished with the best elsewhere. The School 
Commissioner of Ohio, in som.e excellent remarks on 
high schools, says that the three-one-hundredths of 
the public school teachers of Ohio who are in the 
high schools receive one-ninth of the money paid for 
instruction. In Boston about oi>e-tenth.of the teachers 
are in the high schools, teaching about one-twenty- 
second part of all the pupils, and receiving about 
one-sixth of all the salary. The ^v£rage number of 
pupils to a teacher in the high schools is 25.1 ; in the 
grammar schools, 46.8; in the primary schools, 45.4. 
No one will deny that, as the pupil approaches the 
teacher in character and attainments, the pleasure of 
teaching him increases, and the trouble of teaching 
him diminishes. It requires far more vitality to engage 
and direct twenty little children than twenty boys and 



38 High Schools. 

girls of fifteen years. Yet we put nearly twice as 
many little restless bodies and fresh, untrained minds 
into the care of the primary teacher as we put of taught 
and trained pupils under the high-school teacher. And 
then we give to the high-school teacher the higher salary, 
and, most fatal of all, we do not think it necessary for 
the primary teacher, who has the first and widest and 
deepest work to do, to be furnished with all the resour- 
ces which education can provide, but fancy that any 
woman who can read and write — especially if she have 
had a touch-and-go at the normal school — is abundantly 
able to manage these little ones. 

It is not possible to set too high a value on education. 
The more thorough it is in the few the more beneficial 
is it to the many. The deepest, the broadest, the most 
liberalizing culture is to be desired. The scholarship of 
the scholar is the boon and blessing of the unlearned. 
The many are uplifted by the trained and far-reaching 
intelligence of the few. Especially is a reading popu- 
lace the rich soil out of which spring the noblest growths 
of intellect. But I venture to say no man ever con- 
ferred distinction upon this country who owed his power 
to the high school. No man ever illustrated the annals 
of this country who would not have been equally illus- 
trious had the high school never existed. 

This matter is not wholly one of theory. We have 
the two systems — education bestowed, and education 



High Schools. - 39 

purchased — under full headway, in conditions not 
precisely the same, but sufficiently similar to throw 
light on the discussion. In all our smaller villages, 
only the rudimentary education is furnished by the 
public. High Schools, graded schools, music-masters, 
drawing-masters, school-superintendents, and military 
precision pertain only to cities and to towns which 
number a certain considerable population. A country 
village of eight hundred inhabitants has its district 
schools. In these are taught reading, writing, geog- 
raphy, arithmetic, grammar, a little history, if desired; 
and, if the teacher be amiable, he or she will gratify 
the more advanced and studious pupil with as much 
algebra as there is time -for. It may be predicted, in 
the first place, that there is little time for anything. 
The school of forty pupils is broken up into numerous 
minute classes. Grading is not so much as known 
among them. There are seven or eight spelling- 
classes, and four or five reading-classes, and three or 
four geography-classes, and two or three grammar- 
classes; and, as for the arithmetic-classes, their name 
is Legion. A few are counting up apples and tops in 
somebody's First Lessons ; a few are painfully " skip- 
ping about" in the multiplication-table; a few are 
lumbering along through compound reduction and 
proportion and partial payments ; and the elder or the 
cleverer pupils are rushing upon the reefs of the final 



40 High Schools. 

problems. One teacher has them all in leash ; and 
the military discipline consists in tapping them in 
from recess with a ferule on the window-panef; and 
permitting them to take turns in sweeping the school- 
house and bringing the bucket of water daily from 
some neighboring well. This is all the education the 
town affords. 

What are the results ? In point of show, they are 
not to be compared to the city schools; but, in prac- 
tical effect, they compare not wholly unfavorably. No 
pupil is kept back by another's dilatoriness, conse- 
quently there is a sort of self-creating emulation ; and 
the bright scholars make more rapid advance than in a 
more thoroughly organized school. They do not move 
in appointed lines ; but they move with rapidity and 
independence. Organization suffers ; but individuality 
gains. They leave school. Not a boy or girl in town 
to the best of my knowledge and belief, suffers from 
ennui) loiters in idleness, hesitates for something to do. 
They become farmers, masons, carpenters, shoemakers, 
errand-boys, milliners, dressmakers, worsted-workers. 
A few of them go out of town to a private academy for 
two or three terms, to their own pleasure and great 
advantage, and at their own cost. Those in whom the 
rage for learning burns go through a thorough course 
of education at seminary or college. It matters not 
whether they are rich or poor. As one excellent 



High Schools, 41 

parent expressed it, "Johnny must have his larnin." 
And Johnny does have it. It is a noteworthy fact, 
that, through a term of years, this little village, with no 
public means of education except the district schools, 
graduated more students from college, in the ratio of 
its population, than any of the neighboring cities. 
And of these graduates, I never heard that one was a 
failure. All were respectable, self-supporting, useful 
citizens; and some became distinguished. Most of 
them fought their own way, with little or no help from 
their families. They borrowed money from their 
neighbors, who have infinite respect for education. 
They taught school in the winter vacations and made 
hay in the summer. They conquered education ; and 
it became to them a sharp sword and a staff of 
strength. For the intelligence of those who do not go 
to college, I can only say that the town-business is 
conducted with a tolerably rigid adherence to law and 
decorum. There is apparently no more folly, and no 
less honesty, than may be predicated, let us say, of 
New York. The church and the parish organizations 
are maintained with dignity and with the average 
liberality. The prayer-meetings of the church are 
better conducted than any city prayer-meeting that I 
ever attended. There is less droning, less vulgarity, 
less bad grammar, and less self-conceit, with more 
simplicity and directness. Poverty is almost unknown, 



4 3 High Schools. 

and almost disreputable. Everybody is industrious, 
well-to-do, and decently dressed. To the eye of the 
observer, there is no test by which they do not com- 
pare favorably with the members of any city community 
in the same rank of life. 

Why may not some of the methods of the country 
work well in the city ? I know that where hundreds of 
pupils are congregated in one building, each one can- 
not be permitted to do that which is right in his own 
eyes. There must be uniformity to ward off confusion. 
But it should be always borne in mind that this neces- 
sary uniformity is a necessary disadvantage. It is not 
a thing desirable for its own sake. It is praiseworthy 
only so far as it promotes intellectual efficiency. So far 
as it substitutes mechanical action for mental spon- 
taneity, it is disastrous. So far as it carries a pupil 
along by the action of machinery, and relieves him from 
individual responsibility, it is not a signal benefit. 

But, beyond this, why should a city provide any more 
complex education for its children than does the coun- 
try ? Suppose it simply puts within the reach of every 
child the education which the republic requires and 
leaves the rest to the child's own will and ability, 
or to its parents ? Drawing and music are agreeable, 
and a knowledge of them is convenient ; but the same 
may be said of French and oil-painting. We look at 
the high school, we admire its beauty, its order, its 



High Schools, 43 

learning ; we see the grand march of the whole public- 
school system as it passes on from strength to strength, 
and from glory to glory ; and it seems well-nigh sacri- 
lege to lift so much as a finger against its beautiful pro- 
portions. If the object be to perfect a system, then we 
are, doubtless, on the right road : but if the object be to 
institute a select, industrious, prosperous, and contented 
community, there is surely room for doubt. No pret- 
tier sight can be shown to the Prince of Wales than a 
Music Hall full of white-robed, flag-bearing school chil- 
dren ; and a class of boys and girls at the blackboard, 
frisking through Euclid's hardest problems as if it were 
a game of fox-and-geese, is a sight calculated to inspire 
the minds of adults with mingled awe and humility. But 
three hundred idle, well-dressed, well-educated young 
men applying for one insignificant clerkship ; fifty clergy- 
men crowding one ecclesiastical broker's shop on Satur- 
day afternoon; a hundred young ladies answering an 
advertisement for one copyist; throngs of intelligent, 
refined, and healthy persons, in the youth and prime of 
their years, blocking the doorway of every supposed easy- 
going routine office in the country, — is not an inspiring 
sight. I do not say, take away education that these 
people may be left on a low plane to work at common 
things ; but I do suggest whether it is wise for the State, 
any more than for the individual, to interfere with the 
operation of natural laws. I would by every legitimate 



44 High Schools. 

means, advance and encourage education ; but the law 
of Nature is that cost is the measure of value. Give 
to all the boys and girls a fair start in the race, but give 
them not the prizes till they have won them. Let the 
city and the country occupy the same ground of fur- 
nishing to all the opportunity of becoming what they 
are required to become, — good citizens; but let the 
rest be a matter for their own choice and ability. If 
they will be learned, cultivated, distinguished, let them 
earn the distinctions ; but let them not be tempted 
by opportunity to an education without cost, without 
purpose, without enthusiasm, — an education refining, 
ornamental, in many respects admirable, but an educa- 
tion which has the one fatal defect of leaving them 
stranded on the bleak shores of life without the ability 
to take care of themselves. 



INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS. 



INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS. 

THE inutility of the high school, the unsatisfactory 
results of our school system are undoubtedly the 
cause of a large part of the interest now attaching to 
technical or industrial schools. Our people lavish their 
money upon the school system, upon the education of 
their children, with a promptness and generosity almost 
pathetic. But we do not reap a corresponding harvest. 
We have no greater proportion of learned men than 
we used to have ; we have a greater number of unem- 
ployed men and women and we have a great number 
of unskilled mechanics. It is seen that the high school 
only partially fits boys for the learned professions. It 
does nothing at all to fit them for mechanics. The 
remedy suggested is more schools, more system, more 
cost. Again I say, if the perfection of a system be 
our object, this is a good way to accomplish it. If we are 
to change our form of government into a monarchical or 
a parental government, this is a proper step. A system 
that takes in all the trades is more of a system than 

(47) 



^\.S Industrial Schools. 

one that leaves them all out. A government that directs 
and furnishes the tuition and the occupation of all its 
subjects governs a great deal more than one which 
leaves all this to the subjects themselves. But if we are 
not dissatisfied with our form of government, if we be- 
lieve in a Republic, if we believe that citizens are men 
and not children, if we believe it is better for a man to 
walk even crookedly on his own feet, than to go straight 
in government leading strings, we should view with 
suspicion the establishment of Industrial Schools by 
the government. 

One reason against industrial schools is their mani- 
fest and unavoidable inaldequacy. You cannot teach 
all the industries. What shall be the principle of selec- 
tion ? If you have a school for carpentering, must you 
-not also have one to teach the mason, the plumber, the 
farmer, the miner, the sea-captain, the gas-fitter, the 
shop-keeper ? By what right, on what ground, shall the 
State give free tuition to the boy who is going to be an 
architect, while the boy who is going to be a stage-actor 
must shift for himself ? The State ought to furnish tu- 
ition in all trades or tuition in none. It is unjust and 
unreasonable for Massachusetts to tax the fishermen of 
Hyannis to teach a Boston boy how to whittle, while 
the Hyannis boy has to learn fishing on his ^ own 
account. 

So far as this Industrial discussion has proceeded it 



Iud7istrial Schools. 49 

has been not in the direction of thorough but of super- 
ficial Industrial training — just as the Normal School 
does not furnish a superior education to teachers but 
formulates an inferior one, just as the High School gives 
only an inadequate basis for professional work and no 
basis at all for trade's ingenuity. I hear the instructions 
given verbally, and by cards and blackboard, to a boy 
of eight j and I do not wonder that his righteous soul is 
vexed, as his curly head reposes on the pillow, with the 
names and the nature of equilateral and scalene and 
isosceles, with quadrilateral and quadrangle, and rhom- 
boid and rhombus, and sector and quadrant. Are these 
more conducive to the greatest good of the greatest 
number, or are they more accessible to the childish 
mind, than the rivers of his own hemisphere? I shall 
be told to look at the results. I do look at them, and 
am astonished at the excellence of the drawings dis- 
played- Nevertheless I observe that, of the eight 
complete pictures upon the blackboard at exhibition, 
seven have the same initials attached. Yet all the pu- 
pils are required to buy drawing-books and to take les- 
sons in drawing. I have not seen any Industrial 
School plan which proposes to take a boy in the 
rough and turn him out a thorough skilled tailor as 
did the old system of apprenticeship. All that it pro- 
poses to do is to give him a smattering of some trade. 
All that it proposes to do is to add to our "system" a dab 



50 Industrial Schools, 

of mechanics. We are to have all the cost of all the 
great extra machinery of the industrial interests, but 
what the boy is to get is a mere slight superficial half 
hour or so of Industrial something added to his intellec- 
tual training. Mr. Walter Smith, an Englishman who 
has succeeded in attaching himself to the school 
System of Boston after great native opposition — but 
under whom it is only fair to admit Boston is still res- 
tive, lays out his plan thus — and I am certainly safe 
in taking Boston as the highest exponent of educational 
advancement in all respects, for she herself has said it. 
" Judging from the experience of other countries as well 
as the result of what has already been done in this, the 
following plan is the most economical and successful 
method by which technical education may be promoted 
in this country. 

" I. That industrial drawing should be taught in the 
public day-school as an elementary part of general ed- 
ucation, and that industrial drawing and modelling be 
taught in free evening classes, to persons of both sexes 
who are not in attendance at day-schools. To become 
general, this should be accomplished by an act of the 
legislature of each state. 

" 2. That a state normal art school for the training of 
teachers and designers be established in each capital 
city or other convenient centre, in connection with an 
industrial museum and art gallery. 



Indzistrlal Schools. 51 

"3. That the teachers of drawing in normal schools, 
evening drawing classes or schools of art, be required 
to possess the certificate of qualification to act as teach- 
ers, awarded upon examination by the state normal art 
schools. 

" 4. That the national government establish, or assist 
in the establishment of, a great technical school of in- 
dustrial art at Washington." 

Here let it be observed we have a magnificent plan 
comprising a great National Art School at Washington, 
and State Art Schools, Museums and Galleries in every 
city and all the red tape of examinations and certificates ; 
but all that the actual pupil actually gets out of this 
great Industrial System is a little bit of drawing tucked 
in among his other studies. There has never been a 
time since the foundation of the government when he 
could not get that if he wished it without any system at 
all. 

It is not proposed to teach drawing enough to make 
a child an artist. One of the reports says that 
"the Supervisor of drawing — " observe how the 
craze for supervision has penetrated the departments — 
" the Supervisor of drawing, — " of whom I venture 
to say no artist in this country has even so much 
as heard, and I do not say this to blame the Supervisor; 
if any committee in this nation choose to give a 
woman a good salary as drawing-mistress, I do not 



^2 Industrial Schools. 

blame her for taking the salary whether she be an artist 
or not — " the Supervisor of drawing resigned her office 
at the end of two years during which she had not only 
taken the general superintendence of that department 
. . . but had given a complete course of instruction to 
the teachers of those schools. The highest merit of her 
work is that it is no longer needed, as she has enabled 
most or all of her pupils to become efficient and suc- 
cessful teachers." 

I think I am safe in assuming that ever}' person at all 
acquainted with art knows that artists are not turned 
out in that way by the gross. The art that can be 
" efficiently and successfully " learned and taught by 
devoting to it one or two tired hours a week during two 
years of hard work in another absorbing profession is 
not an art of sufficient value to serve as foundation for 
supervision of drawing, or National Museums. I venture 
to say that if the parents of New England wish their 
children to learn so much art as that, there is not a 
teacher in New England fit to be in the schoolroom, 
who could not teach it to her pupils by her own unas- 
sisted reason without the slightest help from any supervi- 
sor whatever. Tell the bright and cultivated New 
England girls, the educated and self-reliant teachers, 
that you wish them to teach drawing and they will teach 
it, and will teach as much as the supervisors know and 
more than the supervisors teach, and they will teach it 



Industrial Schools, 53 

mthout costing the state one additional penny for their 
own tuition. But let us look well before we take this 
step. 

Already our bridges are crashing beneath our feet, 
and our houses tumbling over our heads, because they 
are so badly built. Men will not serve apprenticeship 
to the trades, but with little learning and less experience 
rush in as master-builders ; and property and limb and 
life suffer in consequence. What smattering of art we 
can give children in the common schools will make few 
artists or architects : it is, I fear, far more likely to make 
pupils think art is an easy mistress, and that their "little 
learning," so lightly gained, and their few strokes, so 
ja^untily made, and so liberally praised, will just as well 
enable them to design, to build, and to criticize, as a 
course of education at the Institute of Technology. 

It should be remembered also in solving this problem 
and before we go very deep into this costly and magnifi- 
cent system, that the whole theory and practice of Mr. 
Walter Smith is violently condemned by artists them- 
selves in the interests of art. The man who stands 
at the head and front of the movement to make art 
general is bitterly condemned by the specialists in his 
own line. 

Drawing has been for some time in the schools ; and 
already the world is divided into two parties, each of 
which accuses the other of gross ignorance and inaccu- 



54 Industrial Schools, 

racy, of false drawing, false faith, bad principles, and 
the very bad practices of theft and fraud ; so that we 
have the testimony of experts, declaring that all the 
money hitherto spent has been spent on grossly wrong 
and foolish methods, which is not encouraging. Of the 
merits of the controversy I know nothing, but h-as the 
state a right to make so costly an experiment on 
ground so debatable ? Respecting the importance of 
teaching every child to read, write and cipher, there is 
no difference of opinion. Respecting the importance 
of teaching him to draw there is great diiTerence of opin- 
ion. Is it wise to ignore that difference and undertake 
to impose drawing upon all by a plan which incurs the 
hostility not only of those who are indifferent or opposed 
to all drawing, but of a very large class who are skilled 
in art and who oppose this as an essentially inartistic 
and hurtful method ? 

Deeper than this lies the radical heresy out of which 
all this false doctrine springs. Prof. Walter Smith 
said before the school superintendents, convened in 
Washington — and he says it not alone — that public 
education is the "fitting of youth for the occupations 
of adult life and the duties of good citizenship. 
It can never be too often repeated that our public 
school education contemplates no such thing. It has 
never proposed or pretended to fit youth "for occu- 
pations." Where is the public school or the public 



I?id2ist7-ial Schools. 55 

school code that ever assumed to fit a man to 
be a gardener or a blacksmith, a woman to be a mil- 
liner or sick-nurse ? The only occupation for which 
our public schools assume to fit their pupils is teaching. 
The High Schools assume to fit their pupils partially 
..for the learned professions. Why should the State 
furnish these geometrical and artistic instructions ? 
They are surely not necessary to intelligent suffrage, to 
the safety of the republic. "Because," is the reply, 
"these principles lie at the foundation of all industrial 
education." But what right have we to call upon the 
State to provide industrial education, any more than 
medical or marine education ? We have not a paternal 
government. The State undertakes, and should under- 
take, to furnish only that which lies at the basis of all 
educations alike, which is, therefore, equally valuable 
to all, and not appropriate merely to a small proportion 
of the community. She concerns herself, not with the 
gains of a few, but with the stability of the republic. 
It is no part of the State's business to forestall appren- 
ticeship, to furnish artists for the chintz manufacturers, 
any more than tea-tasters for the Chinese merchants or 
horses and carriages for impecunious writers on lovely 
midsummer mornings. I see no reason why the public 
should pay for the apprenticeship of teachers and the 
partial apprenticeship of doctors any more than for that 
of blacksmiths. I see no reason why we should have 



56 Industrial Schools. 

normal schools and high schools any more than why 
we should have brick-kiln schools and shoemaking 
schools. But to put a museum in every city and a 
national gallery in Washington neither abolishes the in- 
consistency, nor helps along the mechanic. 

" The literary part of our education has advanced," 
says Prof. Walter Smith, " until it monopolizes all the 
precious time of our youth, and the trades and manu- 
factures in which so many have to be employed are 
ignored in our schemes of education . . . until the 
name of the native-born American mechanic is a 
synonyme for want of skill." 

I should like to know in what country Prof. Walter 
Smith finds the name of the native-born American me- 
chanic a synonyme for want of skill. Not in 'certainly the 
nations that attended the last" Paris Exposition. Not in 
the nations that gave Tiffany of New York the highest 
prizes for silver-work and made him the fashion. Not in 
the German nation whose emperor declared that no ma- 
chinery of the world was complete until the Americans 
had put on the finishing touch. Not in the nations that 
gave Americans the first prizes for their second-class 
locomotives and were left far in the rear by American 
ploughs. Prof. Graham Bell did not think so when asked 
why so large a proportion of inventions came from this 
country and why he, a Scotchman, born and educated in 
Scotland, should choose America for his field of action. 



Industrial Schools, 5^ 

He declared that it was because he could not easily 
obtain in England the appliances which his work re- 
quired. 

" If he went to an instrument-maker and ordered any- 
thing out of the usual way, he was met with all sorts of 
difficulties, and v/hen these were over he was confounded 
by the cost. In America, on the other hand, the 
instrument-makers and manufacturers lay themselves 
out specially to secure the custom of inventors. They 
will go to any expense or submit to any inconvenience 
in the way of disarranging their ordinary procedure. Of 
course they do not do this purely in the interests of 
science. They find their account in the business they 
secure should the invention turn out to be a practicabil- 
ity. They are always glad to get new ideas, or be 
themselves put on the track." 

The juries of awards of the Paris Exposition did not 
think so since the general summing up of all the results 
of all the exhibits is that "the United States — though 
the last to enter the lists, though restricted in time, space, 
expenditure and exhibits — has taken more awards tha7t 
any other nation^ and has opened up markets hitherto 
closed to us." 

The very moment when this Americah nation is not 
only sending oatmeal to Scotland and beef-steak to 
England and cotton to all the world ; but sill«s to 
France and watches to Switzerland and the finest parts 



58 I7tdust7-ial ScJiooIs. 

of music-boxes to Italy and steam enginery to Russia 
and cutlery to Manchester and carriages to London, — 
this very moment is seized upon by our South Kensing- 
ton professor to announce in the capital of the United 
States that the name of the natural-born American me- 
chanic is a synonyme for want of skill. 

It follows as the night the day that the name of his 
foreign-born European customer is a synonyme for want 
of sense. 

There is plenty of pooi mechanical work in the 
United States, I sorrowfully admit. A victim to the 
impish freaks of an insane American clock which I 
bought under the combined stress of patriotism and 
poverty, I am ready to believe any ill of the American 
mechanic and solemnly warn every one to invest his ten 
dollars until it becomes twenty and then buy a French 
clock. But none the less is the native-born American 
mechanic — when he gives his mind to it — the best 
mechanic under the sun ; and one of the reasons why 
he is the best mechanic is that he has a mind to give 
to it and that mind has been cultivated by the "literary 
education " of his childhood. That "the precious time 
of youth " is monopolized by literary education is the 
glory not the defect of our school system. For the 
larger part of our youth this is the only time that can be 
devoted to intellectual pursuits. When they grow up 
they must go into the bread-winning trades. I should 



Ifuhtstriai ScJwcls. 59 

be extremely sorry to see the short time they have for 
mental culture abbreviated by the thrusting in of me- 
chanical work before its time. Let them have all the 
learning they will take. Let them be taught by the 
most capable and cultured teachers that no time may 
be wasted, but every moment consciously or uncon- 
sciously be moulding them to refinement, to intelligence, 
to noble living. 

Prof. Walter Smith's claims for the art of drawing are 
so enormous as to excite suspicion. It would seem 
indeed to be the Lost Art, the forlorn hope of the world. 
The reason why our workmen are out of employment 
is that drawing is not taught in the schools. "When 
suffering from the same cause the first thing England did 
was to establish schools of art in the centres of manu- 
factures but that did little good. The next experiment 
was to teach drawing in the public schools, and train 
highly skilled teachers of art, and therein" was found the 
remedy." And while Prof. Walter Smith was enunci- 
ating this newly found remedy for hard times, his coun- 
trymen were eating mule's flesh to keep themselves 
from starvation. This drawing of inferences is certainly 
a most remarkable free-hand drawing. 

Prof. Walter Smith's theory against Socialism, Nihi- 
lism, Communism at home, as against Starvation abroad, 
is the same thing — the teaching of drawing in the 
public schools. He considers that the chief danger to 



6o Industrial Schools. 

social and political order in Massachusetts for instance 
lies in her 3 16,000 workmen. "Massachusetts exists to- 
day by virtue of her manufacturing or industrial inter- 
ests. . . . Massachusetts holds her position among her 
sister states by virtue of the labor of 316,000 of her 
mechanics and artisans. . . . The State passed a law 
in 1870 that drawing should be taught to all children in 
the public schools." 

How lamely lags the logic again ; for it was not till 
1870 that Massachusetts legislated drawing into the 
public schools ; so that if the "position " to which Mr. 
Smith refers, is as he implies, a leading position — and I 
trust no Bostonian native or naturalized would so far 
forget the truth of history as to admit that in any re- 
spect Massachusetts could occupy any but a leading 
position — she must have led, without drawing in the 
schools. That is, according to South Kensington rea- 
soning, Massachusetts occupies her leading position 
— even exists as a state — by reason of her industrial 
interests which have grown up without compulsory 
drawing in the public schools. 

Therefore compulsory drawing in the public schools 
is indispensable to the advancement of industrial inter- 
ests. 

And as Prof. Smith goes on he warms with his own 
eloquence till not only do the axe and the ploughshare 
radiate as much national glory on the shelves of the 



Industrial Schools. * 6l 

great national industrial Art Museum which he is going 
to build at Washington, as does the sword kept bright 
at West Point ; but the ordinary education of the public 
schools, the reading, writing, geography, arithmetic and 
grammar to which the great mass of our people have 
hitherto been confined, and which we have considered 
with all its defects, as our great safeguard against polit- 
ical and religious tyranny, collapses beneath his wither- 
ing gaze into " a miserable 3 R education" ! But if we 
will adopt the British fashion of infusing into our educa- 
tion a decoction of drawing, the Professor promises it 
shall be to us " what embankments are to the Dutch or 
its fleet to the English people." 

As the American- continent has hitherto been able 
to keep itself out of water without general recourse to 
embankments, and as we have not been able to detect 
any analogy in the position or the sensations of the 
United States without school drawing ^ and England 
without her fleet, this somewhat airy substitute for a 
fleet does not commend itself to our enthusiasm so ar- 
dently as might be desired. 

The good Dr. Bartol of Boston, if the report of his 
address, adopted and endorsed by the School Report 
of the city, is to be accepted, went even beyond Prof. 
Walter Smith in his sanguine prognostications of the 
benefits to be wrought by Industrial Education. 

" The first argument was from nature itself; and the 



62 . Industrial Schools. 

second from physiology, the connection of the mind 
with the flesh. The third argument was the economy 
of health ; and the fourth, that industrial education is 
the condition of honesty. Fifth, it would solve this 
question of intemperance ; and sixth, it would banish 
poverty. Seventh, industrial education would be a 
divining-rod to detect mechanical or artistic genius and 
talent which is now mostly left to the discovery of 
chance ; and eighth, we learn this lesson from experi- 
"ence. Ninth, industrial education is the only thing to be 
relied upon for that new desire of the time, the eman- 
cipation of woman. Tenth, it would be the diffusion 
among all classes of useful knowledge. Eleventh, 
industrial education would be happiness ; and twelfth, 
it would be human fellowship. Thirteenth, industrial 
education is the best preparation for that hereafter 
which we call heaven." 

If happiness here and bliss hereafter are to be se- 
cured by teaching trades in the public schools, far be it 
from me to place the smallest pebble of a stumbling-stone 
in the way of salvation. Dr. Bartol embodies in his own 
person so much of that sweetness and light " which we 
call heaven," that I receive all his teachings upon the 
subject with great confidence. I remember also that 
Rev. Mr. Herrick has affirmed his belief " that Boston 
would be known above, not for her Athenian culture " 
— which must be a blow to Boston — but as Mr. Herrick 



Industrial Schools, 63 

is a clergyman of my own denomination I accept his 
testimony also. And I congratulate Boston that while 
she can no longer hope to enter Heaven with Attic 
grace, it is much better to enter as a shoemaker's appren- 
tice than not to enter at all ! 



NORMAL SCHOOLS. 



NORMAL SCHOOLS. 

WHATEVER objections lie against high schools 
and industrial schools lie against normal and 
training schools, while beyond and above these are 
objections from which high schools and industrial 
schools are free. It may be a question whether we 
have the right to impose upon the public the high edu- 
cation of a fev^r, but there is no question that the few 
are highly educated. The high schools do give pupils, 
so far as they go, a good classical education. 

Industrial schools if established will give th^ir pupils 
mechanical skill. Normal and training schools are not 
only objectionable because — if this be an objection — they 
undertake to give a few, at the expense of the many, 
a higher education than the safety of the Republic de- 
mands of all : not only because they give to a certain 
class an education which other classes have to furnish 
themselves, but because they do not accomplish, and in 
the nature of things cannot accomplish, but must retard 
the very end for which they are established. They not 

(67) 



6S Normal Schools, 

only do not secure us good teaching, but they stand in 
the way of good teaching. 

The only training school that is of use for teach- 
ers is the school in which they are teaching. What is 
necessary for a good teacher is, first, natural ability, 
the teaching tact — hiack. This is born and not made. 
No training can give it ; happily, no training can wholly 
take it away, though training does a great deal to ham- 
per it. Secondly, the teacher needs education which 
the schools for education supply. These good gifts are 
improved by experience, but by real experience, in 
actual work, not by sham experience in learning other 
people's work, or in play-work. Teaching is the one 
thing that cannot be taught. To teach teaching is to 
teach nature, experience, mechanism — under which our 
schools are now suffering. A good teacher, sound, 
strong, great-hearted, independent, courteous — that is 
the true normal school. What we want is to put such 
teachers in our schools ; not to take a wooden man and 
put him in a wooden school that he may be hewed and 
chipped into the exact similitude of a thousand other 
wooden men ! If our primary, and grammar, and high 
schools are what they ought to be, they are all normal 
schools; for in them all is good teaching practised 
every day. The mind, the very being of the graduate, 
is shaped, and moulded, and polished by the conscious 
and unconscious influence of the teachers by whom he 



Normal Schools. 69 

has been instructed from year to year. If these are 
not good teachers, it is foolish and extravagant to patch 
up their bad work by the fresh expense of normal 
schools ; the true way is to put the normal school 
money, and the normal school teachers back' into the 
primary schools, that all the children may have the 
benefit of them, and not simply the few who m#iy wish 
to be teachers, or the still fewer who will prove to be 
good teachers. 

The remedy which one superintendent suggests for 
mechanical teaching is to put inexperienced teachers 
" in charge of the older pupils who have not been 
subjected to a mechanical process," so that "the 
inexperienced teachers would learn ways of the teachers 
who had charge of the scholars before them." 

What is that but a mechanical process ? What is 
that but the mere imitation of the methods of some one 
whom the teacher has never seen, and whose wa3^s he 
adopts by a mere mechanical servility? The pupil 
who is under a teacher of strongly marked individuality 
is insensibly moulded into his shajDC, adopts his ways 
by sympathy and admiration, by an unconscious assim- 
ilation and growth which guides, but hinders not, the 
development of his own faculties. Our normal school 
apostles give no weight, no influence, no consideration 
to any teaching until we reach the normal schools. 
They assume that the pupil learns nothing of the teacher 



7o JVorjnal Schools. 

under whose strong grasp he lives and learns for years, 
but must wait until he gets into the normal school, and 
stares at teaching as teaching. But it is the exemplifi- 
cation of good teaching in his teacher — it is the long 
contact with the firm and furnished mind of his teacher 
which fits the pupil, so far as he can be fitted, for 
teaching — not a pseudo-practical or superficial study 
in the normal schools. 

We do not want inexperienced teachers to learn the 
ways of their predecessors. We want them to teach 
their onw way. What they lack in experience, they 
often make up in enthusiasm. What we want in schools 
is fresh blood, originality, individuality, variety, life. 
The training that we need is the training of memory, 
judgment, conscience, nerve and sinew into the best 
American citizen which the boy or girl is capable of 
becoming. The training of training schools and nor- 
mal schools is the training of all into subjugation to one, 
the training of teachers and pupils into uniformity and 
drill and dwarfage. The ideal of the system is to take 
a key and wind up at the centre and have the whole 
mechanism, to the very circumference, tick, and strike, 
and move with unchanged regularity. And this is a 
good ideal for a clock. For a school system it is a bad 
ideal. Drill and routine are so bad for the human 
mind that they ought always to be viewed with suspicion. 
Where bodies of human beings are to act or to be acted 



Normal Schools. *ji 

upon together there must be some routine, but it must 
be kept always at the minimum for the maximum of 
force. Nothing can be more harmful for the mental 
development of a city than to have a training school 
established in the city, and to take the teachers from 
that training school. Monotony and mediocrity will 
be stamped all over it. It would be better to have 
every teacher from a different school and a different 
State. 

Good education should be demanded in teachers. 
It is not now demanded. With all our right hand super- 
visions and our left-hand inspections, men are at the 
head of grammar schools who could not prepare a class 
for the high school to save their lives. Women are 
teachers in primary schools and grammar schools who 
never had the equivalent of one year's thorough study 
at any high school or academy that fits for college. 
The reason of this is not the lack of high schools or 
academies. We need not establish normal schools to 
furnish education. There are high schools and private 
schools enough to give an educated teacher to every 
school that will have one. The education of the nor- 
mal schools is not equal to the education of the high 
schools and seminaries. Compared with them, it is 
shorter, more slight and superficial. We do not hayp 
educated teachers because we do not demand them. 
We content ourselves with uneducated teachers, and 



72 Normal Schools, 

try to make up for it by normal schools to bring them 
up to one mark, and superintendents and examiners, 
and a system which hides their defects under routine 
but does not make good teachers. If now we should 
abolish all this, and should simply demand that every 
teacher should be a graduate of a high school or a 
seminary, or should pass an examination which should 
be equivalent to such graduation, or should bring to 
the committee some satisfactory certificate of equal 
education, we should give an impetus to education 
which would be almost a revolution. 

The learning which normal and training schools im- 
part can be better taught by the high schools and acad- 
emies already established. Their training in teaching 
is in the direction of uniformity and mechanism and 
mental subjugation, which is already the bane of our 
schools and is against individuality and independence 
and self-direction and self-reliance which we sorely 
need. 

The interest which our people take in education is 
almost pathetic, it is so high, so strong, so self-sacrific- 
ing, so instructive. Before me lies an account of the 
dedication of a normal school house in a quiet village. 
The faithful, simple, and honorable account credits to 
" Money raised by the town, . . , $15,000. 
From sale' of old barn and apples, $ 20.50 
Realized from village subscription, $ 7,170. 



Normal Schools. 73 

I know what the sale of old barns and apples means. 
Twenty-five dollars for the barn besides bricks and cart- 
age. When apples are worth marketing it is not a 
bearing year. When there is a good apple crop, barrels 
cost a dollar and a quarter apiece, apples are fifty 
cents a barrel and the vinegar never comes. You 
have to sell a good many old barns to keep the apple- 
orchard from ruining 3'ou. These people spent nearly 
thirty thousand dollars upon their new school-house. 
The building committee made no charge and received 
nothing for their services, but acted solely from public 
spirit. What ought not to be expected from a commu- 
nity whose motives and moods are so high .? What 
wonder that the people came together to the dedication 
of their noble edifice with gladness of heart and brought 
forth the headstone thereof with shoutings, crying Grace, 
Grace unto it ? 

But observe now this normal school requires for 
admission only such education as can be had in the 
common country district schools — the ordinary educa- 
tion which all acquire, with a very slight infusion of 
history, algebra, physiology added — only so little as 
many a young woman gives to the advanced pupils who 
desire it. These pupik, the normal school proposes 
to take and to graft upon their common school course 
its own course of one year in " thorough reviews of the 
elementary English branches, mental science, i:hemistry, 



^zj Normal Schools. 

physics, algebra, geometry, English literature, civil gov- 
ernment, school economy dietetics." All this effort is 
made, all this money is expended, all these congratula- 
tions are exchanged over one year's scramble along the 
outskirts of science. And this is called the higher 
education. 

It is not the higher education. It is the lower edu- 
cation. It is not meeting a demand for higher education. 
It is descending to the clamor for a lower education. 
We are either not able or not willing to employ only 
educated teachers and so we organize ignorance, and 
sprinkle it over with scientific terminology and give it 
a diploma and send it into our school-houses as a grad- 
uate of *a normal school. 

I will prove this from the very pamphlet which cele- 
brates this normal school. 

The memorial which was sent to the legislature pray- 
ing for its establishment says " are more teachers 
demanded each year than are supplied by the graduating 
classes from the two normal schools? It seems that 
the answer must be in the negative. The standard of 
qualification demanded by our school managers is very 
low .... Quite a number of the normal graduates 
of good reputation and success have no schools. The 
facts seem to warrant the conclusion that no more nor- 
mal schools of the same class and grade as our present 
schools are now demanded." 



Normal Schools, 75 

What then ? Did the memorialist give up the idea 
of establishing more normal schools and address him- 
self to the task of elevating public sentiment till parents 
shall see that educated teachers are a necessity in a 
free state? Not at all. He immediately proceeded to 
let down the schools to the level of ignorance. 

*'The course in our normal schools is two years . . . 
I would, therefore, ask the establishment of a normal 
school on a plan somewhat different from our present 
schools. Let the course be limited to six months !" 

And in evident acknowledgment of the slight and 
superficial education which such a ^' course " can give, 
the *' circular " of this school says, " The object of the 
course is the study and practice of methods of teaching, 
rather than t]\Q 'acquisition of knowledge of subjects to be 
taught'^ 

They announce formally that they do not demand 
the higher education as a requisite for admission to the 
normal school and they formally announce that they 
do not profess to give it in the school. 

Could words be plainer ? The normal school is not 
to meet or to make a demand for educated teachers ; it 
is not to broaden, to deepen, to liberalize the mind by 
knowledge; it is simply to put ignorance in decent 
clothes. 

And the good people who have wrought this folly in 
Israel meet and make merry over it. In the very act 



76 No7'mal Schools. 

of lov/ering the flag of their fathers, they call the world 
to witness how bravely they bear it aloft. The chair- 
man of the building committee says he cannot better 
conclude his remarks than in quoting from an address 
delivered seventy-two years before, upon the occasion of 
the dedication of an Academy, by a man of wisdom 
and righteousness who, during a distinguished service 
of twenty-eight years among this people as principal 
and instructor of the academy, was honored of all men. 

He then quotes : "Much praise is due to our civil 
fathers for their readiness to incorporate and endow 
this nursery of learning. . . . May the Author of ev- 
ei-y good gift furnish its instructors and overseers with 
wisdom and discretion, and feed its pupils with knowl- 
edge and understanding. May infidelity and impiety, 
vice and ignorance, be banished from its walls. May 
it foster none who reverence and love not the God of 

their fathers and the Redeemer of men May 

this Academy be distinguished for learning, virtue, and 
good order, till time shall be no longer ! " 

All this is sincere, simple, and solemn, when ap- 
plied to the academy of seventy years ago which w^as 
meant to be a nursery of learning, a feeder of the 
churches, but is grotesque when applied to a normal 
school and its six months' scamper over books, and 
which barely saves itself from sham by formally pro- 



Normal Schools. *j^ 

fessing not to be a nursery of learning but a drill- 
master of ignorance. 

*' Situated on a convenient eminence," says the gal- 
lant governor in his turn, not apparently considering it 
his duty to throw a wet blanket over the new school- 
house, " in the midst of this historic town and among 
an intelligent and refined people traditionally friendly 
and helpful to scholars in consequence of years of 
association with successive generations of pupils of the 
academy and the seminary" — But they would never 
have been traditionally friendly if they had had only 
six months association with scholars. The academy 
I venture to say would never have been heard of and 
would never have surrounded itself with a refined and 
intelligent people, would never have sent out one 
" scholar " into the world, had it confined itself to a six 
months' or a year's skirmish with the picket-guard of 
illiteracy. Of the academy I know nothing, but I hazard 
the assertion that its reverend instructor was a scholar, 
. that its pupils received as thorough and finished an 
education as any school in New England gave, and 
that its graduates went into the world as well fitted and 
furnished to all good works as any school or tutor in 
the land could make them, and not merely veneered 
with the terminology of learning ! 

Still another, unwillingly glorying in our shame, 
brought out the record of the fathers. 



78 Normal Schools, 

" The people of this town years before this province 
became a State were distinguished for their culture, 
and for the sacrifices which they made to secure the 
establishment among them of an advanced institution 
of learning " — This to a people who had made all their 
sacrifices to secure a retrograde, inferior, superficial seat 
of learning! As if a normal school, professedly not 
established for culture were, like the good old academy, 
a nursery of learning; and not consecrated to the 
legitimization, the deification and the perpetuation of 
ignorance. 

" New York expends annually upon her normal 
schools," says one admiringly and for our ensample, 
"nearly one hundred and seventy thousand dollars." 
And the governor of New York in his last annual 
message says, " So far as I can learn, the normal schools 
established in various parts of the State are, with two 
or three exceptions, wholly useless and fail almbst en- 
tirely to accomplish the objects for which they were 
established and for which the State is annually paying 
large amounts of money from the Treasury." 

Is this an encouraging sign for the establishment of 
more normal schools ? 

"Forty years ago," says the orator, " the legislature of 
Massachusetts made its first appropriation for normal 
schools. Since then the work of their establishment has 



Normal Schools. 'j^ 

gone bravely forward." And a school superintendent 
of Massachusetts says in his report: 

" Our normal schools as now constituted seem to me 
to fall far short of their purposes, for though they serve 
to give good suggestions, they often beget a conceit, 
that a more thorough training would dissipate. They 
may in some cases prevent absolutely poor teachers, 
but I doubt if they ever make good ones." 

And this superintendent is writing under the shadow 
of the Boston normal school, which requires of its 
candidates as a preparation for entrance the completion 
of a high-school course of instruction. 

If now the year's course at the normal school serve 
to beget conceit even when grafted upon a high-school 
course, what is it likely to beget when grafted professedly 
only upon such preparation "as would entitle "the 
holder to the lowest grade certificate to teach," in a 
State where its memorialist declares that "agents in 
hiring teachers have regard to cheapness, not to quali- 
fications ? Almost any person can procure a certificate 
to teach." 

Is the money so hardly raised from the sale of the 
old barn and the cider apples, so nobly and touchingly 
contributed by the citizens of the village — is it wisely 
spent in an institution whose characteristic trait is 
to beget conceit, and whose best work is to give 
good suggestions.-* Is it wise and well to spend the 



8o Normal Schools, 

people's money, raised either by taxation or by voluntary 
contribution, in a work whose benefit is so problemati- 
cal that those, whose position should make them best 
acquainted with its results, can only say that it " may 
in some cases prevent absolutely poor teachers, but we 
doubt if they ever make good ones ?" 

That this superintendent is not alone in his doubts 
of the efficacy of the normal school is proved by the 
Report of the Boston superintendent for 1876. He 
says " Twenty-four years ago, a Normal School . •. . . 

was established on a rational basis Very soon 

the original plan, purpose, and organization of the school 
were radically changed, and it is hardly an exaggeration 
to say that ^during almost the whole period that has 
elapsed since the establishment of the school the ar- 
rangements and provisions have been insuffi- 
cient and unsatisfactory."- 

If the original establishment were rational, when it 
was radically changed it must have beconfe irrational, 
that is, absurd ; so that for more than half its existence 
the leading normal school of the leading community of 
the universe, which other States naturally lookiip to as 
their nursing mother, was going on in a perfectly absurd 
manner — was of course wasting the money spent upon 
its support. Is this an encouraging circumstance for 
other normal school men ? 
. Is it better now? " We have now," says the super- 



Normal Schools, 8i 

intendent, " a well-organized and efficient normal school, 

established on a broad and firm foundation 

The peculiar difficulty which a school like this has to 
contend with is that of discriminating between those of 
its pupils who have talent for teaching and those who 
have not, and of convincing the latter that it is their 
duty to engage in some other occupation. If the head- 
master finds in the course of the year [the course of 
training is only for one year] that there are some pupils 
who give little promise of success, he may perhaps pri- 
vately advise them to withdraw from the school. But 
such advice is usually most unwelcome, and is rarely 
accepted as wise and impartial. Still it seems desirable 
that such advice should be given in some cases." 

With one superintendent attesting that the normal 
schools may in some cases prevent absolutely poor teach- 
ers but he doubts if they ever make good ones, and with 
another superintendent treading so cautiously around 
this prevention of poor teachers and building up a 
Chinese wall of ifs and mays and perhapses and in some 
cases, I should say that Massachusetts combines with 
the more outspoken New York in offering to sister States 
but a forlorn hope of greatly improving the quality or 
elevating the standard of teaching by her one year's or 
six months' course in the normal school. 

Mr. Charles Francis Adams, jr., in his late pamphlet 
on the Common Schools, says that the greater part of 



82 Normal Schools, 

the scholars in the Quincy common schools, at their 
examinations in 1873 could only stammer and bungle 
along in their reading. " In other words, it appeared, 
as the result of eight years' school-teaching, that the 
children, as a whole, could neither write with facility 
nor read fluently .... The fact was that the exam- 
inations had shown that In far too many cases they 
could neither read nor write at all ... . It was, in a 
word, all smatter, veneering and cram ..." Yet dur- 
ing those years the annual cost to the town of educa- 
ting each child in the public schools had increased from 
six dollars to fifteen dollars ... It was plain that a 
great waste of the public itioney was steadily going 
on ; . . . that is, of the amount the town was spend- 
ing, not fifty cents out of each dollar were effectually 
spent." 

And Mr. Adams expressly says that "the Quincy 
schools at that time were neither better nor worse than 
those of the surrounding towns; they were, indeed, fairly 
to be classed among those of the higher order, such as 
are usually looked for in the more populous, and well- 
to-do communities in the immediate vicinity of Boston. 

Yet normal schools have been supported by Massa- 
chusetts in Boston and " in the immediate vicinity of 
Boston " for forty years ! 

Further than this, when the Quincy superintendent of 
schools reached the conclusion that he did not under- 



Normal Schools, ' 83 

stand the service of teaching, what did he do ? Says 
Mr. Adams, " he had gone abroad in search of that 
training which he was unable to get in America, and at 
a comparatively mature age had made himself master 
of the modern German theories of common-school 
education." 

So that, if Mr. Adams be a competent witness, our 
best schools, in the very communities where normal 
schools are most numerous and of longest standing, 
under the very shadow of this "well-organized and effi- 
cient normal school," make a meaningless farce of edu- 
cation; and when a man arises who wishes to understand 
teaching, he cannot learn in our normal schools, but 
must go to Germany for training, precisely the same as 
if our normal schools had no existence. 

Yet the Congressional Report gives one hundred 
and fifty-two Normal Schools in this country with eleven 
hundred and eighty-nine instructors. 

Arguing still further from his own • experience the 
necessity of normal schools, a speaker says ; " I recall 
the successive teachers under whom I came as a boy. 
I do not think that there was an ignorant man among 
them, nor one who failed to hold us in due order ; but 
this I can say of them, teachers in the school, and I 
might almost add, professors in the college, that there 
was only one of them all who was truly competent to 
teach, only one who knew how to inspire a whole school 



84 Normal Schools. 

with his own enthusiasm in study, who knew how to ad- 
just his flexible methods to the needs and capacities of 
every scholar, until he made a school composed of one 
part braggarts, and the other part dullards, a company 
of happy, earnest students . . . That teacher ! His 
life, his fire in the school-room, his kindly look, his 
frown, his lucid explanations, his illustrations so new 
and startling to us, his appeals to our individual minds, 
and adroit drawings forth of capacities within us of 
whose possession we had never dreamed \ his ways of 
pricking conceit, his patience with slow, stolid intellects, 
and the moral elevation he gave us, quickening our sense 
of justice, making us to despise a lie, compelling us to 
love him so that I think we could have died for him ! 
I recall only one such and he was" — a graduate of a 
normal school. Truly this is a fascinating even a thrill- 
ing portrait — I surrender. If a normal school can 
manufacture this kind of teacher in six months or a 
year or even two years, I yield to the normal school 
all my homage. But what is this ? Not a normal 
scholar? "I recall only one such, and /;/;;2 my father 
bailed out of jail to put him over us, having wit enough 
to see that there was some other than an evil genius in 
the man . . . The man was a criminal ! Yes. Who 
can explain the anomaly ? One thing I know, he could 
teach !" 

One thing I do not know, and that is what connection 



Normal Schools. 85 

this criminal teacher had with, what encouragement he 
gave to, the establishment of normal schools. If we 
are advocating the doctrine that our teachers should 
first be jail-birds, that our " Educators " should learn in 
suffering what they teach in song, I can see the point ; 
but in the light of untutored reason, I read on that crim- 
inal's brow only the lesson that teachers are born not 
made. 



THE FORM OF BLANKS. 



THE FORM OF BLANKS. 

WE seem to have reached the time when a patriotic, 
progressive, and economical people needs, every 
two days, to remind itself that only two things are abso- 
lutely essential to a perfect school system : teachers and 
pupils. School-houses are convenient, but excellent 
schools have been held in the back chamber of an over- 
large dwelling-house. Books are the most important of 
the non-essentials, but with born teachers and bright 
scholars a first-class school can be carried on with almost 
any kind of a book. A committee-man to represent the 
community serves to simplify matters, to facilitate the 
conduct of business ; but outside of this, nearly every 
thing is riffraff. Conventions, state, county and town ; 
school supervisors, school superintendents, school- 
boards are tolerable devices for busy idleness, for 
mounting hobbies, for expending rhetoric, for practising 
oratory, for exchanging courtesies, for giving a good sal- 
ary to certain unoccupied citizens ; but they are of small 
use to the schools. They are gratifying to the few men 

(89) 



90 The Form of. Blanks. 

and women who receive the salaries and who no doubt 
honestly try to earn them. But they do not advance 
the work of education. It is the teachers and the 
teachers only who do the real work ; and the teachers 
are not helped but hampered and hindered by the 
multiplied machinery that is noisily rattling around out- 
side the school-houses. Whoever will turn his atten- 
tion from the talk about our schools to the schools 
themselves will see that they are at this moment gasping 
under the intolerable weight of petty and pestering 
supervision. 

Unhappily the drift of every movement is in the di- 
rection of more supervision, more machinery, more com- 
plication. The tendency is not to put more brains in- 
side the school-room, but more offices outside. The 
same report that suggests an increase of school 
overseers will suggest a decrease in the number of 
teachers to pupils. The remedy proposed for poor 
teaching is not better men to teach but more men to 
theorize about teaching. The prevalent idea among 
" educators " seems to be that the true way to solve the 
problem is to "inspect " it. Only have "examinations'* 
enough and the work is done. 

The very principle that underlies supervision is wrong. 
" The weak point in the Massachusetts school system," 
said a superintendent of schools, just appointed to go 
thither and strengthen it. "is in its supervision" — which 



The Forin of Blanks, 91 

is true though not as he meant it. *' You cannot have 
good work in a factory without having good overseers.'* 
The fatal weakness which is fastening upon Qur schools 
is succinctly suggested in this one figure. The thing 
which a school ought not to be, the thing which our sys- 
tem of supervision is strenuously trying to make the 
school into, is a factory, with the superintendents for 
overseers and the teachers for workmen. In no sense 
can a school be considered a factory without injury to the 
idea of a school ; but in whatever sense a school is a 
factory, the pupils are the real operatives and the teach- 
er is the real overseer. The superintendent is a mere 
modern invention for receiving a salary, whose benefi- 
cence seldom rises above harmlessness, whose activity is 
usually mischievous. 

'' The clamor that business men should be put upon 
school boards is absurd," said a superintendent of 
schools in a public address. "As well select school 
teachers to run a hospital. The State Board of educa- 
tion ought to be largely composed of teachers." 

Here also is the same false idea developed that the 
schools are to be " run " not by the teachers in them, 
but by a Board outside of them. The teachers ought 
to run the schools exactly as doctors run a hospital. 
The doctors do not meet in a Board a mile away and 
send an order into the hospital to cut off so many arms 
on Monday and administer so many pills on Tuesday. 



92 The Form of Blanks. 

That is left to the men who are standing over the 
bedsides of the patients. Everything which a school 
Board ought to do can be done by business men just as 
well as by teachers. Everything that teachers ought to 
do is done in the school-room. All that any school 
Board ought to do is the mere outside business manage- 
ment, the unprofessional work. All the professional 
work should be carried on by and left entirely to pro- 
fessional teachers in the school-room. 

When I read the voluminous, dignified, and able 
school reports, I confess I am filled with admiration of 
our school "system." But when I make and mark a 
cross section of the system, and see the work that goes 
into it and the children that come out of it, I perceive 
that the old parable repeats itself : as thy servant was 
busy here and there, the man was gone. The servants of 
the people are sonorouslv busy, here there and every- 
where, about the " system ;" but meanwhile the child for 
whom it is, was, or ought to be created, has escaped un- 
taught. 

Not long ago, in the most highly civilized city of the 
universe, there sprang up a very pretty quarrel between 
the superintendent of schools and the Board of super- 
visors. The superintendent received a salary of $4000 
a year. The six supervisors received a salary of $3700 
each. Naturally they all wished to do something to 
satisfy their consciences by way of earning their salaries; 



The Form of Blanks. 93 

but as there was nothing to do, the teachers doing all 
the real work, they, as naturally, fell foul of each other; 
and the quarrel being very bitter got into the news- 
paper. How many such quarrels are hushed up in the 
committee rooms the tax-paying public does not know, 
but this one broke bounds and affirmed in the public 
prints that " if the majority report was adopted it left 
the superintendent practically nothing to do, while on 
the other hand if the minority report was adopted it 
would degrade the supervisors." So it seems that the 
Board and the superintendent agreed that there was 
only work enough for one. But the Board put it very 
politely. They did not once hint that the office of 
superintendent should be abolished. Nothing so prac- 
tical and un-" system "-atic as that escaped their wary 
lips. They only said that " the majority, placing the 
entire executive management and control in the Board 
of supervisors, do so on the ground that it is necessary, 
to secure comprehensive and efficient work, and also to 
relieve the superintendent of the details of daily visi- 
tation and personal inspection " [notice that the super- 
intendent had not asked to be relieved : he was fighting 
strenuously against being so relieved !] " so that he may 
devote hwiself to a more thorotcgh study of the world-wide 
field of public-school education and render greater service as 
a coufisellor and adviser T^ 

Note the cool cruelty of this interloping Board. 



94 The Porin of Blanks. 

The poor superintendent was to be lifted, will you nill 
you, from the whole field of his actual duties and set 
adrift upon the " world-wide " sea of "study." He was to 
be deprived of all power in order that he might ''advise'* 
better. Under the dainty disguise of being relieved 
from the details of daily visitation and personal inspec- 
tion, the dismayed superintendent saw himself stripped 
of his natural right and dear delight of walking into 
the school-houses and nagging the teachers ; and bidden 
to partake himself to the cold comfort of " studying 
the world-wide field of public-school education " what- 
ever that may mean. 

The moralist of the press judiciously and judicially 
pronounced it " largely a question of administration that 
belongs to the school committee rather than the general 
public." But as the general public has all the bills to 
pay, it 'seems to be quite proper for the general public to 
peep in through the chinks whenever it has opportunity 
and see what the superintendents and supervisors are 
really about. 

Two years after this sharp internecine strife over 
the fact that there was not work enough to go round, 
I observe that the School Board of the same city came 
to the conclusion that the text-books of the schools 
ought to be changed. Yet, with Board, and committee, 
and superintendent, and the long summer vacation, the 
September newspapers were printing such paragraphs 



The Ponn of Blanks. 95 

as this: " Two weeks of the school term have passed 
and nobody knows as yet what text-books are to be 
used. The teachers will soon be like the men who 
were required to make bricks without straw." How 
long the schools went on at random before this ener- 
getic supervision could concentrate itself upon the right 
geography \ through what world-wide fields the super- 
intendent had to roam before he could pluck the perfect 
flower of a spelling book ; or whether the majority by 
" placing the entire executive management and control 
in the Board of supervisors have yet secured the com- 
prehensive and efficient work of deciding from what 
book a pupil shall learn the multiplication-table, I have 
not been careful to ascertain. But I do not believe a 
single successful and prosperous private school can be 
found in this country or a single public school for which 
the principal, male or female, is alone responsible, 
that, after two months' vacation, gathered its pupils fresh 
and then dawdled on a fortnight without knowing what 
books it was to use ! 

Close by stands a great brick school-house, frequented 
by hundreds of pupils, and ten or twelve teachers, su- 
pervised by ten committee men and one superintendent 
of schools. Yet,- after a two months' vacation, the 
teachers and pupils were afloat, and the school-house 
unoccupied for a week, because no principal had been 
secured; and on the second week the superintendent 



96 The Porm of Blanks. 

was seeking a female " substitute " to act as principal 
till a man whom he had precipitately selected, but who 
could not give all his time for a week or so, should be 
ready to appear. Yet all this time, superintendent and 
teachers were on full salary, and the hundreds of little 
wanderers were expected to come out at the end of the 
term as well furnished mentally as if they had given all 
their time to their studies. 

What are the school superintendents doing ? They 
are grinding their organs in the public halls. They are 
taking to themselves the credit of whatever value is in 
the schools, every particle of which credit usually belongs 
to the teachers who do all the work that is anything worth. 
They are hindering and bothering, discouraging and de- 
moralizing the teachers by giving them so many 
useless things to do that they have little time to do 
useful things; by giving then so much petty pother- 
ing that they have not time to do important work. 
They are destroying the individuality of the teachers 
by cumbering them with so many of their theoretical 
plans, that the teachers have neither time nor spirit 
to form or to execute their own plans which are plans 
springing from actual knowledge of actual needs, and 
not from the exigencies of an idleness that must be busy. 
They are insulting and degrading the teachers by im- 
posing upon them rules and demanding from them 
reports which a teacher may properly impose upon and 



The Form of Blanks. 97 

require of the pupil but which are^ utterly subversive of 
the position of a teacher. They are thereby forcing out 
and forcing back from the schools the good teachers, all 
active, original, independent and stimulating minds, 
and are retaining and attracting for the schools only 
such as are obliged by poverty to teach, and such 
others as are so listless and sluggish and uninter- 
ested that they care not what they do or leave undone, 
if they can but get through the term decently and get 
their money at the end. The supervision is thus eating 
out all the life of the schools by making them a round 
and routine of uniformity and mechanical drill ; taking 
from the teacher freedom, ambition and influence, and 
sacrificing the pupil to a showy and sonorous " system." 

" The new secretary," says the delighted reporter, 
*' has the reins now fairly in hand and if his life and 
health be spared there is every reason to believe that 
the public school system of the State will receive . a 
marked impress from his administration." 

Whether the public schools will be improved, whether 
the pupils will have firmer mental fibre on leaving them, 
no one hints, but the system will be more systematic. 
*' County supervision, the meeting of school commit- 
tees, and high schools are the three leading topics " of 
the report ; so that two-thirds of the discussions are of 
matters outside the schools themselves, and the other 
third is of the smallest the least practical and the 



98 The For7n of Blanks » 

least attended of the schools ! The supervision and the 
school committee and the high school claim all his at- 
tention. The numerous primary and grammar schools 
where the great populace receives its education, where 
the masses of the nation are prepared for republican 
government, escape his notice ! 

'' Some of the secretary's best work thus far has been 
done in — " in what ? "In conducting Teachers' Insti- 
tutes ! " " Nine of these were held for nine successive 
weeks in the autumn, and he and others of the best ed- 
ucators of the State were thus brought into personal con- 
tact with a very large number of teachers, giving them 
the latest and most improved methods of instruction." 

But the teachers have just as free access to the latest 
r.nd most approved methods of instruction as have the 
superintendents and the educators. The teachers are 
just as good authority on methods as are the educators. 
The teachers are not an ignorant and narrow class of 
pariahs, who do not read the newspapers, do not travel, 
do not observe, do not think, but must sit at the feet of 
the educators to learn what is good for them to know. 
The teachers are just as intelligent, just as learned, 
just as refined as the superintendents and the educators, 
and they generally know a good deal more about teach- 
ing than do the educators. There is no more reason 
why the superintendent should gather the teachers for 
instruction than there is why the teachers should gather 



The Form of Blanks, 99 

the superintendents. The teachers can give the super- 
intendents points quite as munificently as the superin- 
tendents can give them to the teachers. If these 
Teachers' Institutes were held during vacation, they 
were taking time which could be much more properly, 
spent in unprofessional frolic. If they were held in 
term time, they were taking teachers away from their 
proper and profitable work in the school-room. The 
time which belongs to the children whose parents are 
paying taxes for their education was frittered away in 
pursuance of a useless and visionary system. Teach- 
ing can be learned and practised only in the school- 
room. 

An admirable and epigrammatic though unconscious 
summary of the work of school superintendents was 
given not long ago in the newspaper report of the doings 
of the Association of New England School Superintend- 
ents. After recording the various nominations of offi- 
cers for the ensuing year it concluded .with the startling 
information, that " the subject of the form of blanks, 
as reported by the committee on Statistics, was next 
considered." 

Nothing can more truly and tersely describe the work 
of school superintendents than " the form of blanks '* 
— the shape of nothing. 

Let us look at some of these " blanks " after the New 



lOo The For7n of Blanks. 

England school superintendents had put their heads 
together to produce them. 

Here is a " blank " sent in to the various schools by 
one of these " comprehensive and efficient " super- 
intendents. (See page loi.) 

I beg to ask whether it is really essential to the per- 
petuity of the Republic to pay a man $2500 a year to 
sit down to the primer and pick out exploitations for the 
first class to spell, and refreshmeiit for the second class, 
and employment for the third class, and satisfaction for 
the fourth class, and kindness for the fifth class and 
thankfully for the sixth class. Is there any possible 
reason why the teachers of those classes, at six or eight 
hundred dollars a year, cannot do that precisely as well 
as an outside man at $ 2500 ? Would the symmetry of 
our school system be menaced, would the object of clas- 
sification be sacrificed, if refreshment had been delegated 
to the first class and satisfaction to the fifth ? Is no one 
but a superintendent capable of that fine mental analy- 
sis which can detect the progress of the sixth class by 
the way it spells thankfully^ but could find no unit of 
measurement if the explorations of the first class had 
dropped out of line .? 

I think teachers ought to be equal to this " compre- 
hensive and efficient work." I go further, I go a great 
deal further, and every real teacher will go with me, and 
affirm that any teacher who has a right to be a teacher 



The Fo7'm of Blanks. 



lOI 



SCHOOL. 



AN EXERCISE IN SPELLING UPON WORDS SELECTED FROM 
THE READING-LESSONS FOR THE COMING YEAR. 



OCTOBER, 1878, 



FIRST CLASS. 

No. of 



Scholars present, 

WORDS 
TO SPELL. 

Preparation 

Weighed 

Guest . 

Prayer 

Stealthily 

Familiar 

Fleecv. 

Buried 

Catastrophe 

Blasphemy 

Panicide . 

Prejudice . 

Asperse 

Superseded 

Fitting 

Survey 

Chasm 

Business . 

Skilful _ . 

Explorations 



FAIL- 
URES. 



FAIL- 
URES. 



FOURTH CLASS. 

No. of 
Scholars present, 

WORDS 
To SPELL. 

Peasants 

Vineyards 

Specimen 

Slippers 

M.iidens 

Vicinity 

Leisurely 

Incapable 

Conveyed 

Inteliijjeut 

Patiently 

Pigeons 

Boisterous. 

Gracious 

Believe 

Soveteign 

Friendly 

Deceive • 

Fashion 

Satisfaction 



FAIL- 
URES. 



SECOND CLASS 

No. of 
Scholars present. 

WORDS 
TO SPELL. 

Especially 

Wrestled . 

Hopping . 

Lilies . 

Threshold 

Doubting 

Transferred 

Iceberg 

Neighbors 

Handkerchief 

Counterfeit 

Science 

Enlargement 

Difference 

Superiority 

Frequented 

Relieved . 

Petted 

Papa . 

Refreshment 



FIFTH CLASS. 

No. of 



Scholars present, . 

WORDS 
TO SPELL. 

Precious 

Punctual , 

Physician 

Shipwreck 

Machinery 

Saucers 

Liquid 

Headache 

Juice . 

Autumn 

Convenient 

Anchored 

Seized 

Reindeer 

Awkward 

Banana 

Sensible 

Brilliant 

Bi.-.cuit 

Kindness 



FAIL- 
URES. 



FAIL- 
URES. 



THIRD CLASS. 

No of 
Scholars present, 

WORDS 
TO SPELL. 

Forfeited . 

Perverse . 

Amiable 

Sincerity . 

Diary . 

Citizen 

Honorable 

Responsive 

Valiant 

Eloquence 

Resided 

Ornaments 

Reverence 

Displayed 

Supplicants 

Receipts 

Marriage • 

Families . 

Foreign 

Employment 



FAIL- 
URES. 



SIXTH CLASS. 

No. of 
Scholars preseiit, 

WORDS 
Tp SPELL. 

Obedient . 
Volume 
Opportunity 
Operations 
Agility 
Perceive 
Gnawed 
Guessing . 
Pursued . 
Handwriting 
Monarch . 
Anxious 
Steadily 
Conquer . 
Laughing . 
Thorouglily 
Kneeling . 
Dazzling . 
Ungrateful 
j Thankfully 



I02 The JForjJt of Blanks. 

can teach spelling her own way better than she can 
teach it the superintendent's way. The true teacher is 
always fertile in resources and directs each day's devices 
to each day's needs. To thrust upon a teacher whose 
hands are full and over-full of her own work — ingen- 
ious often and always patient and effective — these 
wooden arbitrary blanks is a piece of impertinence to 
the teacher and a waste to the public which has to pay 
for the paper and printing of a useless piece of machin- 
ery. The teacher would do the whole work a great 
deal better without a farthing's extra cost. If she can- 
not do it the remedy is not to raise up another piece 
of machinery to do it for her, but dismiss her and find 
a woman who can. There are plenty of them. 
Here is another blank. (See page 103.) 
Here the superintendent and the school committee 
have succeeded in solidifying and formulating the 
degradation of the teacher. The teacher is to report 
to the superintendent as an in ferior to a superior. 
He or she is not supposed to have energy, self- 
respect, self-interest, esprit de corps enough to stand 
to his business, but must be held up to it by marks, 
as a pupil is held up to study, -as a factory hand is 
held up to the loom. But to whom does the superin- 
tendent report absence and when was a superintendent 
ever known to provide a substitute ? Imagine Dr. 
Arnold of Rugby, Mr. Capron of Hartford, Mr. Wa- 



The Ponn of Blanks. 



103 



Here is another Blank. 
City of 
Office Superintendent of Public Schools. 

[In School Committee, May 16, 1878, it was ordered that "each Teacher shall, 
at the end of each school term, send to the Superintendent of Schools a report of 
the number of school sessions in which he or she has been absent from school 
during that school term, the reasons of such absences, the names of the substi- 
tutes, and the number of school sessions each substitute was employed in his or 
her school ; and if any teacher is absent from school, he or she shall immediately 
give notice of such absence, and the reason therefor, to the Sub-Committee hav- 
ing charge of the school, and to ihe Superintendent."] 



.School. 



Report of. , 

for the Tertn^ 187 



Number of Sessions absent from School., 



NAMES OF SUBSTITUTES. 



No. of 

Sessions 

Employed. 



Cause of Absence. 



I04 The Por7n of Blanks. 

ternouse of Newton, reporting that they had stayed 
away from school three hours, one to attend a funeral, 
one to meet a wife at the railroad station and one be- 
cause the turkey was stuffed with oysters. But the 
superintendents keep at a respectful distance from this 
grade of teachers. They confine their attentions to the 
grammar and primary schools whose teachers are 
mostly women and uneducated men. They all walk 
softly before college diplomas but head an army of 
women with unflinching courage. They are mighty in 
the spelling-book, but I never heard of a superintendent 
mousing around a high school with selected problems 
in the higher mathematics, or intricate Greek render- 
ings. 

These reports demanded of teachers are absolutely 
useless. The money spent in printing them, the time 
spent by teachers in filling them out and by superin- 
tendents in sending them in, are absolutely thrown away. 
A school is automatic or it is nothing. If a teacher be 
not honest, conscientious, up to the mark, of his own 
impulse, he cannot be made so by any outside pressiire. 
If unnecessary absence and tardiness, if laxness, indo- 
lence, indifference, be not organically impossible to the 
teacher, there is but one remedy, dismissal. To create 
and pay a superintendent to piece out the teacher's de- 
fects is a foolish, useless, wasteful device. The real 
teacher is prompt, alert, energetic, effective, because it is 



The Form of Blanks, T05 

in him to be so. If it is not in him, no one can put it 
in. So far from being kept in place by a report he can- 
not be dismissed from his place too soon. The time- 
server is not improved, but the real teacher is insulted 
and exasperated by this childish and petty requirement. 

" Teaching," says a superintendent in his Report, 
"should have the talents and energies of our best edu- 
cated and highest cultivated men and women, men and 
women who in addition to their talents and culture feel 
that a dignity and a responsibility belong to the work 
worthy of their most conscientious efforts." 

But how many of our best educated men and our most 
highly cultivated women will be likely to rush into the 
school-room if they are to be considered and treated as 
mere lip-servers without any pride or conscience in their 
profession and ready to slip out of the school-room and 
neglect their classes at any moment, if not restrained 
by the knowledge that they must give a report thereof 
to the superintendent! How much "dignity" is likely 
to accrue to the teacher from the knowledge assumed 
by the superintendent that she can only be kept in line 
by a carpenter's rule ? 

I append another "form of blank" to show the 
" comprehensive and efficient work " of the school super- 
intendent. (See page 106.) 

Here it will be seen, the school committee has a 
meeting to order the school superintendent to or- 



io6 



The Po7'7}i of Blanks. 



City of 
Office Superinte7ideiit of Public Schools. 

[In School Committee, September 12, 1877, and January 24, 1878, it was 
ordered that the Superintendent each month obtain and keep a record of certain 
statistics pertaining to the schools. The teachers are therefore requested to fill 
the following blanks, and make returns on or before the Wednesday following 
the first Saturday of each month. J 

Statistics of the School, 

For the -week co7itammg the first Saturday 

OF THE 

Month of 187 

Nuvther of teachers, including the Master, ... . 

Average number of Pupils to a teacher. Master not included. . 



RECORD OF THE DIFFERENT ROOMS. 



Names of Teachers. G A L W P T 



Total, 

R. No. of the Room. G. Grade of Class. A. Average attendance for 
the week. L. Largest number present at any session during the week. W. 
Whole number belonging to each room on the last day of the week. P. Num- 
ber of instances of tardiness on the part of the pupils during the week. T. 
Number of instances of tardiness on the part of teachers during the month just 
ended. 

[The whole number should include those temporarily absent on account of 
sickness or for other cause. To find the number of pupils to a teacher, divide 
the whole number of pupils by the number of teachers, not including the Master.] 



The JRor?)! of Blanks. 1 07. 

der the school teachers to bring in certain statistics. 
The committee demand the statistics and the teachers 
furnish them. The superintendent is nothing but a 
middleman passing the papers back and forth — of no 
more real use than the dukes and counts who stood 
between the bureau-drawer and Louis the Fourteenth 
handing his shirt around among themselves according 
to rank, while the grand monarch stood shivering for 
the moment when etiquette should permit it to be 
pulled over his royal head ! 

The opinion held b}^ the school superintendent of the 
intelligence of his teachers is suggested by his paternal 
explanations. One of the requirements is : 

"Average number of pupils to a teacher, master 
not included." 

"To find the number of pupils to a teacher," says 
this amiable lady from Philadelphia to the Elizabeth 
Elizas and Solomon Johns of the school-room Peterkins, 
'''' divide the whole number of pupils by the number of 
teachers, not including the master." 

That the teachers of this country could ever find out 
how to ascertain "the average number of pupils to a 
teacher, master not included," if the superintendent 
had not told them ; and whither the schools would drift 
but for this " com.prehensive and efficient work" of 
supervision, it is not easy for the uneducational mind to 



loS The For 771 of Blanks. 

In pursuance of the same " efficient and comprehen- 
sive" system of red tape statistics, a superintendent 
came to the grammar school house after twelve on 
Monday noon with intent to be there in season to in- 
form the teachers of the result of an official meeting 
regarding the Centennial held on the previous Saturday 
as " the [male] principal was not able to go " and the 
female assistants were not expected to attend. Most 
of the teachers had left the building and the superin- 
tendent came again in the afternoon. Now one would 
suppose that even if the principal had not been able to 
attend, he ought, on a salary of 15^2500, to be able to hear 
and deliver the Report of the superintendent. On the 
contrary four of the assistants, receiving a salary less 
than one-third of his, from as many classes, are called 
to leave their work in the midst of recitation and de- 
tained for half an hour to receive a detailed account 
of action ; and before they are fairly at work with their 
classes again, they are again interrupted and asked to 
go around on their respective floors and communicate 
their information to the other teachers ! 

The same superintendent was ordered by the com- 
mittee to ascertain the possibility of consolidating rooms 
by inquiring the number of pupils in the different classes. 
Instead of earning a part of his salary of $3000 by going 
around and getting the statistics himself, he put a pa- 
per into the hands of a busy teacher who received a 



The Form of Blanks. 109 

salary of $850, and she visited the whole fifteen rooms, 
got the number of pupils in each room and the num- 
ber of sittings In each class, and returned the paper 
to him, and he I suppose handed in his " comprehensive 
and efficient " work to the committee. But what a blow 
would be struck at our beautiful " system " if the com- 
mittee should ask the teacher to count her pupils instead 
of organizing a superintendent to ask the teacher to 
perform that comprehensive and efficient work ! 

Not long ago, a boy of the third class in a school 
thoroughly furnished with all the officers required by 
our efficient " system " was eating candy in school and 
was directed by his teacher to throw it into the waste- 
basket ! He complied at once, remarking as he passed 
her that she was "ad — d fool " in tones loud enough 
to be heard throughout the room. The teacher sent 
him home and appealed to the superintendent of schools, 
who replied that "had she suspended the boy, he could 
do something but now did not like' to interfere and 
would rather the committee should settle it." The com- 
mittee were consulted, the boy remaining in school the 
while, and the committee held up the discipline of the 
school and the beauties of the '• System " by the start- 
ling assurance to the boy that for the next offence of ^ 
whatever nature, he was to be " sent to me !" 

A revolutionary proceeding from the responsibility 

of which a comprehensive and efficient superintend- 
10 



no The Form of Blafiks. 

ent of schools might well shrink ! And in their annual 
report the committee declare that " it is impossible 
to overestimate the services of our superintendent," 
who among other things "is constantly hastening the 
settlement of all questions of management and discipline 
that demand authoritative interposition !" 

Let me give, at the risk of being tiresome, another 
instance of the rapidity with which a superintendent 
hastens the settlement of all questions of management 
which require authoritative interposition. 

However tiresome it may be to the reader, it is not 
half so tiresome as it is to the teacher whose work is 
almost neutralized by this petty "authoritative interpo- 
sition." 

And here let me say also that I am writing of facts, 
not rumors nor generalities nor newspaper stories. I am 
writing of things that actually happened and are re- 
corded in the private journals of teachers made up at 
the time and on the spot. 

"Just as school began, the principal came in standing 
with his back to the scholars, shading either side of 
his face with a hand, and asked in a very mysterious 
way, "Did you ever keep a boy half an hour after 
school because he went out in school-time ?" 

I. Never, 

Prin. Stop and think. 



The I^^orm of Blanks. iii 

I. I don't think I have stayed fivQ minutes after 
school a day this term. 

Prin. You sure ? 

I. Very sure. Why? 

Prin. There is a complaint that you have and that 
you told the scholars that the superintendent sanctioned 
it. 

I. Who told you this ? 

Prin. The superintendent. 

I. Where is he now? There is no truth in it. 

Prin. He called at my house this noon and told me 
so. [Then starting to go out I called him back and 
said] 

" I wish you would stop and explain to me what 
you mean." 

Prin. Well, that is all. He says there have very 
often been complaints from the parents, and the last is 
from your room. 

I. I will see the superintendent at once. 

Prin. No, I would not do anything about it. It 
will make him nervous. 

I. Nervous ! Has not he made me nervous ? Why 
should I not find out about it at once ? 

Prin. Because I would not. There is no use, he is 
nervous enough now. 

I. I shall send to his house at once. 

Which I did — stopping my school work to write a 



112 The JFort?i of Bla^iks. 

note in which I asked if he would send me the name of 
the parent who had made such a complaint. The note 
came back to me. He had been gone from the house 
fifteen minutes. At four o'clock I went down to the 
superintendent's office. 

I. I came to you to understand better a complaint 
that you made to Mr. Principal that I had kept a boy 
half an hour after school, because he had asked and re- 
ceived permission to leave the room, and that 1 had also 
said to the scholars that you sanctioned such a thing. 
Sup. Well, no, not exactly that. It did not come 
from a parent. 

I. Not from -a parent ? From whom then ? 
Sup. Well, I don't know as I have any right to say. 
I. Of course you have a right. The complaint has 
been made to you and I think you ought to tell me from 
whom. 

Sup. Well, it came from one of the committee. 
I. It does not matter — committee or parent — it is 
wholly without foundation. Will you tell me who it 
was? 

Sup. Mr. Committee ; but I think you have mis- 
understood about my not sanctioning such a rule. I 
should sanction it in certain cases, but I did not like 
the idea of its going abroad in the community that 
because a boy left the room, he should always stay his 
half hour.* * * 



The Form of Blanks, 113 

I. Thank you for telling me who made this com- 
plaint. I will see Mr. Committee at once. 

Sup. No, I will see him myself and save you the 
trouble. 

Very well, if you will do so and have this contra- 
dicted, I will be greatly obliged to you. 

Sup. I will do so certainly at once. 

This was Thursday afternoon. Hearing nothing 
Friday, I went to Mr. Committee's house at four o'clock. 
He was out— would not be in till six. After tea I went 
again. 

I. I have traced a complaint [naming it] from one 
of the parents to you. There is no truth in it, and I 
would like to have you tell me what you know about it, 
who it was. 

Com. How did you know about it ? 

I. I was told by the principal that the superintend- 
ent had complained to him. I have seen the super- 
intendent and he tells me you made theJ complaint. 

Com. Well, I don't know as I have any right to give 
you the name, though I don't just know why I should 
not. It was Mr. Smith. 

I. Mr. Smith? 

Com. Yes, Henry Smith's father. You have such 
a boy in your school t 

I. Yes. 

Com. Well, his father says you kept him one day 
10* 



1 1 4 The Form of Blanks. 

after school half an hour because he asked and you let 
him go out in school-time ; that his mother had sent a 
note asking you to grant any such request. 

I. I have never had a line from her. When did his 
father make this complaint ? 

Com. Wednesday, and he said it was the day before. 

I. Tuesday ? The boy came into my room for the 
first time Monday. It is a little singular that I should 
have kept the boy so long the day after he first camiC 
to me. 

Com. Not at all strange. A good teacher would 
enforce her rules the first day. 

I. I can only say there is no truth in any such report 
.... I am obliged to you for what you have told me. 
I v/ill see Mr. Smith now and see what cause he has 
for such a complaint. 

I went to the store where Mr. Committee thought I 
should find him. I saw the grandfather. 

I. I am looking for your son, I think. Has he a 
son in the Blank School ? 

Grandpere. Yes. 

I. Can I see him .'' 

G. He is quite sick ; left the store this afternoon, 
unable to stay. 

I. By going to his house will it be possible for me 
to see him ? 

G. No. Not to-night. He is too sick. 



The For7}i of Blanks. 115. 

I went home. The next morning, the boy Smith 
brought me a note from his mother asking for him per- 
mission to leave the room. I called the boy into my 
little room and asked him, what day did I keep you half 
an hour after school ? 

Boy. You have never kept me half an hour. 

I. Why, yes, I hear I have this week, and I want 
you to remember what day it was. 

Boy. Does it say so in that note ? 

I. No. I have it in another way, and I want you to 
remember the day. 

Boy. You have never kept me half an hour. 

I. Have I ever kept you at all t 

Boy. No, except ^one day when you kept the whole 
line ; then I did not go till the last one. 

I. How long was that ? 

Boy. Perhaps five minutes. Not more than that. 

He took his seat. . A very short time after, Mr. Com- 
mittee came in. I told him what I had said and done. 
He seemed surprised and called the boy out of the room 
and was gone some time. Coming back, he stayed only 
long enough to say *' it is very strange." 

Hearing nothing more from Mr. Committee or the 
father, after dinner, I presented niyself at the store. 
Is Mr. Smith here ? No ; he is at hoir^e. Do you ex- 
pect him here this afternoon? Very likely, but not at 
all sure. I took the number of his house and went 



Ii6 The Form of Blanks, 

there. When he came into the room, I introduced my- 
self. 

I. I understand you have made a complaint to this 
effect, etc., etc., etc. 

Mr. S. I .? Why, no, not at all. 

I. Have not you said to Mr. Committee that I kept 
your boy, etc., etc. 

Mr. S. Certainly not. 

I. It is very singular. He told me you had made a 
complaint to him. 

S. It might have been Mrs. Smith. Let me speak 
to her. 

I. (Finding him slipping from my hold.) It is wholly 
unnecessary. I did not understand the complaint to 
have come from Mrs. Smith. 

S. (After talking some time longer) Just let me speak 
to Mrs. Smith. 

I. Very well. If you will come back with her I 
have no objection. 

They both came back. Mrs. Smith disclaimed all 
knowledge of the affair, not even having seen Mr. Com- 
mittee till the night before. 

I. Has your son ever complained to you that I have 
kept him ? 

Mrs. S. No, on the contrary he has said several times 
this week that you were not in the habit of keeping the 
scholars after school. 



The Form of Blanks. 117 

I. I will see Mr. Committee again. I am very 
sure that he told me that it was Mr. Smith who com- 
plained to him and I must still think that he did. 

I certainly was not prepared to hear him say then, 
"Well, I don't know but that I was the one who made 
such a complaint to him, but I did not speak of it with a 
view to making any trouble. I remember I only -asked 
him if his superintendent sanctioned any such punish- 
ment for I thought it rather hard. I did not say that 
you had kept Henry. In fact I don't think I knew in 
what room he was. But I am very sorry. I am willing 
to make all the reparation in my power. What can I 
do? 

I requested him to see both" the superintendent and 
committee and state the whole thing to them. Oh ! yes, 
certainly he would. Would he see the committee at 
once ? Why, yes, if I said so. I did say so decidedly 
and came away. This was Saturday. Hearing nothing 
all day Monda}^, I called Harry at night. Will you 
ask your father if he has seen the committee and don't 
fail to bring me word in the morning. In the morning 
this note came from Mrs. Smith : 

(" Mr. Smith has called both on superintendent and 
committee. Everything is explained satisfactorily on 
both sides. It seems Mr. Committee's own boy made 
the same mistake as Henry and went home and told 
his father it was a committee rule ; and Mr. Committee, 



Ii8 The I^orm of Blanks. 

having given leave to some teachers to keep troublesome 
scholars half an hour, did not wish it to become a gen- 
eral rule and so corrected it. The superintendent said 
it was not to find fault but to have it understood that 
it was not a committee rule and no one need think 
themselves accused.) I have been expecting the super- 
intendent in ever since to acquit me, but he has failed 
to put in an appearance. Perhaps it makes him nervous 
to think of it." 

I should be very glad if some eulogizer of our inval- 
uable " system " would point out the exact spot where 
the "authoritative interposition" of the inestimable 
superintendent touched this momentous question of dis- 
cipline to the facilitation of its settlement. To the un- 
systematic mind there seems to have been no question at 
all except what was gotten up by the mischief-making 
hands of idle outside ofhcials. The teacher had no trou- 
ble with the pupil. The pupil made no complaint of the 
teacher. The parents had no question except about what 
the committee had said and done. And when the father, 
as was his right and duty, spoke to the committee about 
what seemed to him a hard rule, neither committee nor 
superintendent had the manliness to defend or to exon- 
erate the teacher, nor the business efficiency to ascertain 
the exact state of things and set the father right; but, 
as has been done from Adam down, they shoved and 
shouldered the blame upon the woman where it would 



The Form of Blanks. 119 

have remained to this day, had she not been a woman 
of spirit and straightforwardness who declined to per- 
mit this little question of mismanagement and discipline 
to settle itself quite so hastily as the superintendent 
and committee had designed ! 

On one side of a half-sheet of letter paper is printed 
this form of blank. (See p. 120.) 

To what depths of ennui must a superintendent of 
schools have descended before he could cudgel such 
questions as these from his tortured brain ! What wastes 
of desuetude must be inferred before that fagged brain 
could form and write these questions, and send them to 
the press, and correct the proof, and inspect the revise 
and yet not see how foolish and cumbersome and impo- 
lite they are ! The busy teacher is absorbed in doing 
the work. The idle superintendent drones in to harass 
him by making him leave off and write essays about it. 
The real teacher instinctively apprehends the part of 
his work that is least profitable, instinctively dwells 
lightly on that, and as instinctively gives most attention 
to the most profitable part. If he disapproves of any 
part of the course of study, he talks it out at all times 
and to all persons whenever and wherever he chooses, 
ho7'es the committee and harangues the parents and 
writes to the newspapers, and pencil-marks in the school- 
books those blessed paragraphs which the pupils need 
not learn. 



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The Form of Blanks, I3i 

And what must be thought of the manners of a super- 
intendent of schools who in addressing a community of 
teachers most of whom are his social and intellectual 
peers, and some of whom are his superiors, arrogates 
to himself superior virtue, and orders the teachers to 
consult the interests of their pupils as if they would 
heed only their own selfish preferences but for his per- 
sonal intervention. The grotesqueness of sending these 
rude missives to the Mr. Caprons or the Dr. Arnolds is 
palpable even to the superintending eye, but their au- 
thors scatter them broadcast over the desks of women 
and fancy because women have no vote and no voice 
in public protest, that they do not resent and repel the 
impertinence ! 

It may not escape the reader's notice that the super- 
intendent gives only a vulgar fraction of a half sheet 
to the teachers' replies. If the teacher had any spon- 
taneous opinions on these subjects she might possibly 
like a little more space than remains, "on this sheet." 
But the answers are not of any importance. The good 
superintendent is only striving to keep himself busy, 
and the spiritual comfort he receives from the mental 
effort of propounding the questions is far more impor- 
tant than anything the working world may say in reply. 
I question if the superintendent even read the answers 
thoroughly. 

One more form of blank : 
II 



122 The Po7^m of Blanks. 

FOR TEACHERS. 
Make a list of ten words in common use most frequently^ 
mispronounced, not includingy«5/ or tvell. 

Prepare general questions about Reading or Reading-Books. 
Also questions upon the following pieces : 
1st Class. Lessons — — 
2nd " " 21 35 

3rd " *■ — — 

4th " '' — — 

5th - 

6th '^ " — — 

Return by 7th November. 

Here the belabored superintendent seems to have 
betaken himself to the next stage after the spelling 
struggle. Having exhausted orthography he applies to 
elocution and turns his " comprehensive and efficient" 
mind to devising and printing and proof-correcting and 
distributing girculars ordering the "teachers " to "pre- 
pare " and " return " at a certain set time to the super- 
intendent such questions as a real teacher puts to her 
pupils thirteen to the dozen every day, and never thinks 
of it again. 

But what the teacher does spontaneously, impulsively, 
with interest and enthusiasm, out of the fertility of her 
own mind, becomes a bore and an exasperation when 
she is ordered to do it by an outside, arbitrary power. 
At the very time she is ordered to do this she has 
planned to be doing something else. And what she does, 



The For 771 of Blanks. 1 23 

she wishes to do for her class and not for the super- 
intendent. She is never without suspicion that what he 
wants are her ingenuity and experience to piece out his 
own defects. The real teacher is spontaneous, alert, 
rapid. She instinctively seizes the strong and the weak 
points of her pupils, applies the proper stimulus to each, 
and passes on quickly to something else ; and there is 
so much to do and so little time in which to do it that 
she must pass on quickly or the opportunity is lost. 
But we think we have greatly advanced beyond our 
fathers because we have invented a superintendent who 
goes clattering clumsily on wooden shoes after the teach- 
er, calling upon her to stop in her pressing and impor- 
tant work for her pupils, and write it off and square it 
down and send it in to him. As things are, she feels 
under obligation to do it, but she does it at the expense 
of the pupil. We have circulars, statistics, and reports, 
and tables, and forms of blanks, and we glorify our sys- 
tem ; but the pupil suffers. We sacrifice unto our net and 
burn incense unto our drag ; drag and net are well 
enough to catch fish with, but very mean gods to worship. 
Sometimes, some teachers feel bound to obey orders 
from the superintendent and sometimes they do not. 
A certain superintendent issued the fiat that '* sentence- 
writing was to receive especial attention until the tenth 
of April to make ready for the Centennial even if other 
studies had to be neglected." Of course at the end of 



124 The Form of Blanks, 

the school-year in July just as much would be expected 
of the classes, so that this amounted only to so much 
extra labor. " Now," said a spirited and successful 
teacher, " I do not in the least care for this myself ; 
and if he had said we will give especial attention 
to shoemaking and pork-packing for the next three 
months, I would produce the shoe and the pig, say 
nothing, and go on as I pleased ; but there are so many 
teachers who will fret and worry over it, that I am ex- 
asperated ; and I think it, besides, an entirely false ba- 
sis on which to work — this selecting any one thing on 
which to drill, drill, drill, and pass the results on to the 
exhibition as a sample of the natural working of our 
school system." 

I append a "Form of Blank" for sentence-writing: 

DIRECTIONS FOR THE EXERCISES. 
JUNE 8, 1S78. 

Each teacher will have such exercises written as will best 
show the work for the year. 

Any old exercise, either original or dictated, may be repro- 
duced j not copied. 

It is suggested that the 5th and 6th classes confine their 
writing to one page; that the other classes use both pages — 
one page for an original exercise, either a letter or compo- 
sition. Teachers, howevei", need feel under no restraint 
because of the suggestion. 

The exercises are to be written during the usual school- 
hours, without reference to books or aid from teachers. They 



The Po7'in of Blaiiks. 125 

can be written on slates or paper and then copied, but should 
not be recopied without stating the fact on paper. 

The exercises are not intended to be an examination for 
the promotion of scholars. Teachers are requested not to 
put marks of any kind on the papers. 

It would perhaps be difficult for the superintending 
mind to make a more brilliant exhibition of its micro- 
scopic tendencies. It is nothingness raised to the third 
power. The absolute unimportance of the orders 
seems to be heightened by the remark that teachers need 
not observe them ! In the warmest and busiest season 
of the year, when pupils and teachers are at high 
pressure preparing for their useless and mischievous 
summer examinations, the idle superintendent goes into 
the school houses at four o'clock in the afternoon dis- 
tributing these Forms of Blanks to be used next day, 
burdening the teachers and pupils with this load of 
extra work piled upon their already stupidly overladen 
shoulders, yet carefully avoiding one finger's weight up- 
on his own back by the canny provision, "The exercises 
are not intended to be an examination for the promotion 
of* scholars." If they had been, the superintendent 
himself might have been forced to take the responsi- 
bility of examining and marking them for the summer 
examinations ; but by this disclaimer, he evades all 
such responsibility and simply makes it a work of 
supererogation. Yet this useless and capricious order, 



1 26 The Ponn of Blanks. 

given without consultation with teachers, applying tests 
already amply supplied by other processes and not 
intended to have any bearing on the approaching exami- 
nations, involved mechanical drudgery of preparations 
which occupied the exasperated teachers till eleven 
o'clock at night. 

And the money raised for the real work of teaching, 
goes to paying a man two or three thousand dollars 
a year — besides printers' bills — for evolving from his 
so-called brain and imposing upon teachers and pupils 
this " educational" trash. 

Amid a good deal of mischief which Satan finds for the 
idle hands of a school superintendent to do was the or- 
der that no teacher should give out to her pupils as late 
as half past eleven or half past three any problem in 
arithmetic to be solved before dismission. The reason 
alleged was that it excited \kv^ pupils, made them restless 
and uneasy if they could not finish the work. A teach- 
er who had often and successfully tried this device for 
smoothing out her own ruffles and her pupils', when it 
had been an unusually hard day, was asked what she 
should do about it. She quietly replied that she should 
keep on and find out whether the superintendent meant 
her! 

She has kept on a good while and I do not think the 
superintendent has yet discovered that he did mean her ! 

Every born teacher knows that success, one might 



The Form of Blanks, 127 

almost say, consists in keeping pupils interested and in 
keeping them busy. Idleness is the fruitful mother of 
mischief and if the teacher can devise ways to make 
the pupil forget his last few listless moments in spirited 
work, she is a wise and ingenious teacher. The notion 
that our boys and girls have not stamina enough to 
stand the wear and tear of an arithmetic question at 
half past eleven in the morning, or at half past three in 
the afternoon is a pitiful one. Any American citizen 
should be ashamed to be the parent of such a child ; 
but if x\merican children are such, the path of reform 
is straight. Dismiss the children at half-past eleven or 
half-past three or when ever the hour comes that their 
flabby brains and puny muscles and relaxed nerves 
must stop work, and send them into fresh air and frolics 
and freedom ; but do not detain them in constrained 
idleness in the putrid air of the school-room to become 
more and more enervated. 

The born teacher, if she is also born strong, can do 
a good deal to neutralize the mischievous intermeddling 
of the superintendent. The poor teacher flounders in 
futile struggle even with his suggestions. A well- 
meaning and unobjectionable school superintendent 
once cautiously expressed the opinion that the reading 
in the schools was the thing most open to hostile criti- 
cism. Of course all the working reading- teachers had 
not waited for this suggestion which is a perfecdy safe 



128 The Porm of Blanks. 

one for any superintendent to make. Indeed it is not 
a little curious to observe the caution with which super- 
intendents report. The most common remark is that 
while " there is a great deal of improvement manifest, 
there is still much to be desired." The first clause in- 
dicates that, the superintendent has done a great deal 
and therefore justified his existence ; the second that 
there is a great deal still to do and therefore his office 
must still be continued. It only occurs to me that the 
teachers could say this just as well as the superintendent. 
He knows the shortcomings of his class just as well as 
the superintendent knows them, and he knows the sig- 
nificance of these shortcomings a great deal better 
than any outsider knows them. But I happened to be 
witness to the effect which these superintending criti- 
cisms had on one — male — teacher who never saw any 
defect until it was pointed out to him, and then it ap- 
peared to him a defect only because it was pointed out 
to him. All the morning exercises were most incongru- 
ously varied with premonitions of the reform which 
was to come upon the afternoon reading. '" The su- 
perintendent found fault with your reading." " Get 
your other lessons so as to have more time for the 
reading ! " ''I am going to attend more to the reading 
to get ready for examination." And all the .time the 
good man never disclosed the slightest suspicion that 
he was appealing to any but scholarly motives or that 



The Porm of Blanks. 129 

he was governed and incited by any but manly, profes- 
sional impulses ! 

So in the afternoon the class was summoned all to- 
gether and not as usual in squads. Unfortunately the 
lesson selected was the twenty-third Psalm, "The Lord 
is my Shepherd," and the teacher began in loud tones, 
ruler in one hand and book in the other, "Read louder, 
'The Lord is my Shepherd,' louder ! " and down comes 
the ruler on the desk with a bang. "Now read that 
over again and open your mouth. 'Though I walk 
through the valley of the Shadow of death' " — another 
rap with the ruler that makes the very books bounce. 
Then with still higher tones he rides more rough-shod 
than ever over a line or two by way of example "Surely 
goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of 
my LIFE ! " — so emphasizing not to say hallooing the 
last word and banging a doubly fierce accompaniment 
with his baton, that it seemed to be a struggle between 
the utterance of the word life and the. crash of the ruler 
as to which should make the most noise ; and thus they 
went over and over the twenty-third Psalm until every 
member in a class of twenty or more had had his rol- 
licking tilt into the valley of the shadow of death, and 
forever all its sweetness and sanctity had trampled 
under foot. 



EXAMINATION 
UNDER THE MICROSCOPE. 



EXAMINATION UNDER THE 
MICROSCOPE. 

ONE especial form into which the rage for super- 
vising seems to have rushed is examination. If 
the teachers can only be examined enough and if the 
schools can only be examined enough, children will be 
well educated. Some of our school superintendents, for 
want of something better to do, have even gone into an 
elaborate analysis of the various kinds and philosophies 
of examination and the subtle metaphysical distinctions 
between examination and inspection. "An inspection 
is a visitation for the purpose of observation, of over- 
sight of superintendence." 

"An examination is a thorough scrutiny and investi- 
gation, in regard to certain definitely determined mat- 
ters for a specific purpose." 

That is, an inspection is a visitation for the purpose of 
observation. An examination is an investigation for a 
specific purpose. Is an examination then made with- 
out a visitation. Is not observation a purpose? 

(.133) 



134 Examination under the Alicroscope, 

" The aim of inspection is to discover to a greater or 
less extent the tone and spirit of the scliool, the conduct 
and application of the pupils, the management and meth- 
ods of the teacher, and the fitness and condition of the 
premises." 

" The object of the examination is to arrive at a just 
estimate of merit, or attainments or progress." 

Is not an estimate of progress implied in an estimate 
of attainments ? What is the merit of a school — which 
we are told must be ascertained by examination — ex- 
cept its tone and spirit, the conduct of the pupils and 
the teacher, — which we are told must be ascertained by 
inspection ? 

We then have a still more labored division of exam- 
inations into three kinds. 

"Examinations of classes, to ascertain their progress 
and to determine the rank of the pupils composing the 
class. 

"Examination of pupils, for promotion, for gradua- 
tion, and for distinctions or honors. 

"Examination of schools and classes, with reference 
mainly to the merit and standing of the teachers." 

A classification that is worthy of Dogberry's analyt- 
ical mind. 

" Many, sir, they have committed false report." 

" Moreover they have spoken untruths : 

Secondarily, they are slanders j 



^Examination under the Microscope. 135 

Sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady ; 

Thirdly, they have verified unjust things ; 

And, to conclude, what you lay to their charge." 

How can you have an examination of schools except 
by an examination of classes? How can you ascertain 
the nierit of teachers except by the work they do for pu- 
pils? How can you examine classes, or schools, or 
pupils without ascertaining, in the very act, the merit of 
the teachers ? Having examined the schools, and the 
classes, and the pupils, what sort of process is the su- 
perintendent driving at, separate from these examina- 
tions — to ascertain the merit and standing of the 
teacher? By aid of these purely imaginary distinctions 
he succeeds in spreading his essay on examinations 
over seventeen printed pages of his report — but in 
not one of them does he give us the smallest inkling 
of what this teacher's examination is. Under that 
head he prints only the most useless generalities. He 
tells us what the examination should do and what sort 
of man the examiner should be, but he does not give a 
hint of the way to do it. It is to be a guide and stim- 
ulus to the teacher, he says. " The examination should 
be so conducted as to discover and appreciate merit, to 
encourage sound teaching, — teaching that trains a-nd 
educates ; teaching that is solid rather than showy ; teach- 
ing that aims at the highest good of the pupils, morally 
and physically, as well as intellectually." All as fine 



136 Examination under the Microscope. 

as a fiddle but how to do it ? How conduct an exami- 
nation for instance so as to find out whether the teacher 
aims at the highest good of the pupils? Will you 
question the teacher or will you question the pupils. 
If the latter will you ask them directly if their teacher 
aims at their highest good, or will you find out by their 
geography and arithmetic examinations ? If the latter 
you are landed instantly in the midst of the regular 
examinations, and the third classification may be entirely 
dismissed. If the former let us have a few affidavits 
from pupils certifying the reasons for the belief that 
is in them, that their teacher is aiming at their highest 
good. Or is it the teachers that are to be questioned ? 
Are they to be questioned in school or out? And if a 
teacher has once been admitted on examination, what 
right has the superintendent to order sub-examinations ? 
what right has he to a teacher's time out of school, or 
what right has he to take a teacher's time away from 
the pupils in school? 

When this Report was published, the newspapers 
came out with this analysis of the different sort of ex- 
aminations as if it really meant something — as if here 
was a great and mysterious work which made education 
in the nineteenth century something extraordinary. On 
the contrary it has no meaning whatever. It is much ado 
about nothing. Examination is as simple as a b c. 
Examination goes along with instruction every day of 



JExamination under the Alicroscope, 137 

a scholar's life. The process of teaching is a process 
of examination as well. Every good teacher, every 
teacher who is fit to be a teacher, knows the rank and 
progress of every class and every pupil under her care. 
She knows who are fit for promotion and who are fit for 
graduation and who deserve honors. She does not 
trouble herself with meaningless generalities about 
sound teaching or highest good. She is concerned 
solely in making her pupils learn and comprehend their 
lessons and behave as well as possible each day. No 
school examination whatever is of the slightest use 
to the pupil or the teacher except the examination of 
each class in recitation "every day. This examination 
the superintendent may superintend if he choose. He 
will be very much in the way. He will divert the 
attention of the pupils and probably embarrass the 
good teacher and tempt the poor ones to take on airs, 
but so long as the "System" ordains a superintendent 
I know no law that empowers a teacher to keep him 
out of her school-room. Possibly, indeed, he is as 
much out of mischief there as anywhere. 

The pupil's rank, his fitness for promotion or gradua- 
tion are known to the teacher by each day's experience; 
are remembered and recorded by each day's marks 
which are the formal basis for his next year's standing. 
The teacher is the best, the only judge. If she does 
not judge wisely and rank justly, she is not fit to be a 



138 Examination under the Mic7'oscope. 

teacher. She has a radical .unfitness which cannot be 
amended by "examination " but by a dismissal and the 
selection of another teacher. All examinations super- 
added to this daily examination, whether they be 
public and oral or private and written, are a needless 
drain upon the nervous energy, the vital force of both 
teacher and pupil. The one may entertain the parents 
and excite the children. The other is an intolerable 
burden to both teacher and children. Neither is of 
any use to the pupils. The time and vitality consumed 
by them should be devoted to fresh study and real 
progress. 

0ur whole system of reviews and examinations in 
school is burdensomely cumbrous and extravagantly 
expensive. I may assume that the memory of our own 
school-days is fresh in all our minds. We can very well 
recall the interest we took in some studies, the lack 
of interest we felt in others. I doubt not our experi- 
ence is almost universally the same. The first breaking 
ground was delightful. We took each lesson each day 
with fresh interest. But when the book was finished, 
and two or three weeks of review came, it was all a 
drag. Neither teacher nor pupils had the stimulus of 
novelty. I would abolish the whole system of reviews. 
The very fact that they are without interest is a strong 
indication that they are without benefit. But, without 
a review, how can the pupil pass his examination 



Examination under the Microscope. 139 

and be promoted ? I would abolish the examination, 
too. No one whose attention has not been called to it 
can guess the burden which the close and careful in- 
vestigation of the hundreds of thousands of annual, 
semi-annual, and tri-annual examination papers in the 
grammar schools and high schools imposes upon 
teachers. It is a wholly dry, uninteresting and exas- 
perating work, and it is equivalent to the employment 
of a regiment of extra teacher-force. It is no part of 
the natural duty of a teacher, and I cannot see that it 
is productive of the least good. The pupil's standing 
for the next term or the next year is determined by it. 
But the teacher knows beforehand perfectly well what 
the pupil's standing ought to be ; and if he desires to 
formulate that standing, to prevent the possibility of its 
being decided, or suspected of being decided, by the 
pique or partiality of the teacher, to have something to 
show the parent as a reason for his son!s promotion or 
degradation, there is the daily record of his daily reci- 
tation and behavior, — a standard just as statistical and 
fixed, and far more trustworthy. 

Multiplication is the very best review of addition. 
Division is the very best review of subtraction. Alge- 
bra is the proper review of arithmetic ; and rhetoric 
and logic are the best reviews of grammar. The cram 
of a three-weeks' review preparatory to examination 
has no more tendency to fasten facts in the mind than 



izjo Examination under the Allci'oscope. 

the building-up of a new science on the foundations of 
the old. Every day's lesson should be thoroughly 
learned, and exactly recorded. That record, at the 
end of the term, should decide the pupil's rank for the 
next term. If he has studied faithfully, and mastered 
fairly, he has derived all the good necessary from the 
pursuit. A two or three weeks' cursory ramble over 
the old ways, which have lost their novelty, will but 
fatigue and bore him to little purpose. If he has been 
idle and unfaithful, he will not be likely to recover much 
ground in two weeks. Let him feel that it is minute, 
daily fidelity that must do his work, and not a lazy, 
careless lounging for ten weeks, to be made up by a 
spasmodic spring at the end. This is neither scholarly 
nor business-like. 

If his daily record gives him the requisite percentage 
for promotion, he is promoted : if not, he remains where 
he is. But the faithful and studious, though necessa- 
rily somewhat flagging, not to say jaded, pupils are not 
stimulated by the factitious interest of a test examina- 
tion to tread over again a path from which their feet 
have already beaten out the greenness, and their hands 
have plucked the flowers. 

I even venture to go farther, and question whether a 
pupil's advance from class to class shall depend so 
entirely upon his standing in the lower class. Ambi- 
tion is a great spur \ but, first and last, there are many 



Examination under the Microscope. 141 

dull, stupid, plodding children, who are conscientious 
and industrious, but who never seem actually to master 
anything. They hang on to a study and clutch a few 
rags of fact here and there ; but they are constitutionally 
disabled from comprehending it. There are others not 
stupid but one-sided. They may be unconquerably dull 
at figures but instinctively clever in history. I knew 
a girl who w^ent through her botany with but one 
answer to every question, to the great amusement of 
her classmates. It was sheer stupidity that could give 
only the one plaintive, pathetic, hesitating response of 
" cellular tissue." But it was a clear case of genius, 
when a little Cambridge boy, the other day, closed his 
list of the exports of Massachusetts with "many 
learned men from Harvard College." If such chil- 
dren must stay in the fourth class until they have an 
intelligent and consistent acquaintance with fourth-class 
studies, they may mull on in the fourth, class forever or 
be disheartened and disgusted and leave school. But 
they will imbibe, pick up, and otherwise possess them- 
selves of, a great deal of stray information regarding 
those studies j and they would do the same regarding 
the studies of the third class, and the second class, and 
the first class, if they could be permitted to enter those 
classes. Now as their parents must pay their full 
share of the taxes which support the higher classes and 
the high schools, is it quite fair that these children 



143 JBxaminatio7i under the Mla'oscope. 

should be deprived of all the advantages of those 
schools because they cannot utilize some of them ? If 
a boy cannot do the very best should he not be en- 
couraged to do the next best? If he cannot get as 
much out of arithmetic as his neighbor is that a rea- 
son why he should not be allowed to get anything out 
of algebra or chemistry ? Let the system of marking be 
the same as it now is. Let any proper percentage 
be required for rank-admission to a class. But let there 
be such a thing as admission without rank. If, upon 
consultation, parents prefer that their children should 
not remain in the lower class but should go into the 
advanced class without rank, let them go, to seize and 
assimilate what knowledge they can, to get all the 
floating benefits that come from class association, and 
to find perhaps by and by, the very stimulus they 
need to start them in some new and bright career, or, 
at the very least, to gather from novelty and variety all 
the information that can be available to them. Ambi- 
tion will not be dispensed with ; for those alone are 
honorary members who have won their spurs j but neither 
will slowness and dullness be doomed perpetually to 
the outer darkness of the monotonous lowest class. 
The bright pupils will not be kept back ; for the tasks 
will be set to their measure and not to that of the 
weaker brethren. They will have all the credit of 
proficiency, all tlie aids to ability, and all the stimulus 



Examination U7tder the Microscope. 143 

of competition; while the more slow, perhaps more 
stupid^ but perhaps also more gifted, more peculiar, 
and more original minds will be able to get out of the 
school-training everything in it which is adapted to 
their nature and capacities. 

If written examinations are drudgery to the teacher, 
uselessness to the pupil, and a waste to the community, 
public examinations are still worse. They are not 
only useless but demoralizing. They introduce a false 
standard of scholarship, a false motive of action. Writ- 
ten examinations are tolerably accurate tests. There 
may be here and there some unfair failure through mere 
nervousness ; but ordinarily the good scholar and the 
poor scholar show themselves with a degree of exact- 
ness on their examination-papers. The only objection 
is that they show themselves with even greater exact- 
ness on their daily record, and, therefore, the other one 
is unnecessary. But a public oral examination is no 
criterion whatever of scholarship. It is not scholarship 
but self-possession and confidence that carry the day. 
If these are combined with scholarship, well ; if not, 
the faithful but timid pupil has the bitter regret of un- 
deserved failure. This however is but a slight and 
comparatively unimportant objection, since this is an 
inequality of fortune that inheres in nature rather than 
in circumstance, and must last through life with more 
or less modification. It is not only in school but in 



144 Examhtation U7ider the Microscope. 

the world that self-possession gives advantage ; and it 
may be not ill that the child should early recognize this 
fact, if so be he may try to overcome timidity and secure 
self-possession. What is radically wrong is that " ex- 
amination " is too often made to bear heavily upon 
methods of study. The whip and spur applied are not 
fidelity, the necessity of learning a lesson because it is 
right and scholarly to do so, because a lesson half 
learned is a shabby and slovenly performance, a disgrace 
and a detriment, but "examination is coming." The 
pupils are urged to do what will make them appear best 
at examination. And this is the worst kind of unschol- 
arly motive because the results are themselves unschol- 
arly. Prizes are sometimes given in schools and sums 
of money in colleges. These are often objected to as 
unworthy motives. And it is certainly no more scholarly 
or noble to learn a lesson accurately for money than it 
is to learn it successfully for show. But the money is 
offered for exactness and acquisition. The boy who is 
studying for a prize does real studying. He is learning 
to apply himself, to deny himself, to conquer his books, 
and after he has done this, and in and by the doing, he 
acquires the training which study is intended to give. 
But studying for show is but a cheap superficial thing. 
That which shows best is not necessarily that which 
implies thoroughness, assiduity, and perseverance. A 
flimsy and faithless pupil can be trained for exhibition. 



Examination luider the Aficroscope. 145 

An indifferent teacher may be a brilliant manipulator 
and showman. 

The public examination is often but a public exhibi- 
tion. It is not to ascertain but to display proficiency. 
To the community, to the actual existence of the school, 
it may be important. Our school-system is expensive. 
Tax-payers must be kept good natured. There is per- 
haps no surer method of attaining the desired end than 
to dress the cljildren in their best clothes, and send 
them to the blackboard to draw, and make them sing 
and read and spell, before an admiring audience. 
Their bloom and youth and cleverness are all-conquer- 
ing ; and their schools are seated more firmly than ever 
in our affections. We see the charm of what is done. 
We see little of what it cost or of what is left undone. 
But it will not do to give up this slight actual contact 
between the schools and the community. No. But is 
there not a more excellent way? Suppose we have 
the public exhibition just the same. The children come 
just the same in gala dress. Arrange whatever festive 
exercises you choose ; but instead of hap-hazard recita- 
tions in geography and arithmetic, let the exhibition 
gather around, and centre in, the public reading of the 
actual record of the best scholars. The dullards should 
not be mortified by their dulness in black and white ; 
but let there be a roll of honor in each study on which 
shall be inscribed the names of those who have at- 
13 



146 Exa?nination under tJie Aficroscope. 

tained a certain percentage, together with the percen- 
tage attained. This may include behavior, lateness, 
attendance, as well as study • so that those who cannot 
be great may have a chance to be good. Thus, without 
destroying the modesty of a child by making him stand 
and speak alone before a public audience, you can yet 
gratify and stimulate an honorable ambition, and do it 
v;ithout any uncertainty or injustice. His prominence 
and praise do not depend upon his momentary mood, 
his timidity, or his nervousness in public : they depend 
upon his daily, solitary faithfulness to duty. That which 
they tend to establish is a habit of right living; and 
what they tend to promote are exactness and thorough- 
ness. There may be a presentation of floweis, or med- 
als, or money ; but the point is, that what is rewarded 
and feted is not sham and shoddy, sound and fury, 
signifying nothing, but solid value. This would put a 
stop at once and forever to all " preparing for examina- 
tions." It would give to the teachers the duty, .and that 
alone, which belongs to them, — of performing each day 
that day's duties. If some exercises of drawing, read- 
ing, reciting, or singing, were desired they would be 
furnished : but they would be furnished simply as 
amusement and exhibition by those best drilled in such 
arts : they would not be palmed off as an indication of 
the general proficiency of the school. A large part of 
the strain and drain, both upon teachers and pupils, 



Examination under the Microscope. 147 

would be removed. We should not, as now, have the 
heaviest burden imposed upon them when they were 
least able to bear it ; but the close of the term would 
bring what it ought to bring, — rest. When a study had 
been once faithfully studied, it would be dropped and 
that would be the end of it. The wearied mind would 
not be forced through a mere mechanical and most 
tiresome drill of review ; but after a sufficient season 
of repose it would take up a fresh and higher science ; 
and listlessness would give way to energy. 

Much is said about overwork in schools. We see 
that teacher and pupil are nervous, easily broken down. 
Both are frequently leaving school in search of health. 
The children have not the care-free faces, the plump- 
ness, the bloom, which should characterize childhood ; 
nor have the teachers the fixity and firmness of strength, 
the robust hardihood, which should characterize men 
and women. The reasons are not far to seek. It is 
not the learning or the training of schools : it is nothing 
that belongs to the legitimate work of teaching. It is 
the multiplication of tasks, that tire without training: it 
is the piling-up of a ponderous machinery, that does no 
work but its own " demnition grind," and is paid for 
out of the purse of the parent, and the blood of the child j 
and it is, first, last, and always, the pestilent and poison- 
ous air, without which, it would seem, no modern school- 
house can be considered thoroughly furnished unto all 



148 Examination under the Microscope. 

good work. Give to the pupils only the task of learning 
faithfully each day's lesson, and gaining, each day, a 
record of faithfulness ; never burden any day with the 
negligence or the disability of a previous day, except as 
it must naturally come with the added difHculty of that 
day's task ; let there be no fearful looking-for of future 
judgment, which may be inexact and capricious ; let the 
pupils never be tempted to roll up great bundles of 
knowledge to be laid in a heap at the feet of the com- 
mittee on examination-day ; let them have plenty of 
fresh, untainted air to breathe, — and I think the puny 
pupils and the nervous teachers would slowly disappear 
from our schoolrooms, and their places be supplied by 
women and children with spring in their souls, and 
muscles in their bodies, as well as brains in their skulls. 
In conducting a public school examination, if exami- 
nations there must be, the greatest care should be taken 
to preserve intact the pride and sensitiveness of both 
teacher and pupils. The object of the examination is to 
find out how things are, not to show how they ou^t to 
be : it is to see what the pupils know, not what they da 
not know. If the methods of the teacher be bad, if he 
be superficial, uninteresting, inaccurate, incapable, 
examination-day is no time to correct or reveal his mis- 
takes, or to supply his deficiencies. If he be young, 
inexperienced, or a woman (the rhetoric may be at fault, 
but I trust not so the logic), he will have difficulty 



Examination under the Alicroscope. 149 

enough in carrying himself well without extraneous 
stumbling-blocks. I think therefore that it is generally 
better, more fair, and conclusive, to leave the examina- 
tion in the hands of the teacher, than to delegate it to 
any member or members of the examining board. It is 
on the old Scripture principle, " My sheep know my 
voice." The pupils are familiar with their teacher and 
his ways of questioning ; and that familiarity, and the 
confidence it inspires, are likely to give them command 
of their knowledge ; while the stranger's voice, and his 
different way of looking at things, are likely to drive 
their small store of information out of their poor little 
heads. If, however, the examining committee do put 
the questions, they can hardly confine themselves too 
closely to the book and the subject-matter. They 
should know exactly the pages which the class have 
been studying and on which they ought to be prepared ; 
and then the point is to ascertain whether the pupils 
know, not cognate things, ramifying things, parallel 
cases, facts which depend on the principles laid down 
on those pages, but whether they know those pages 
themselves. We hear a great deal said about pupils 
being taught to think ; and examiners are sometimes so 
eager to find out whether pupils can think, that they 
are but bunglers in finding oiit what they know. But 
the first requisite to thought is knowledge. We need 
facts and not inferences. Let us make sure that 
13* 



150 Examination imder the Microscope, 

pupils know what is in the book, and trouble ourselves 
less about what is outside the book. In our desire to 
make learning interesting, we are in danger of forgetting 
that it needs first to be accurate and sure. No amuse- 
ment, no interest, no explanation, no illustration, is any 
substitute for the action of the individual pupil's own 
mind, for his ability to pin his attention to his book 
without aid from any person. 

With all our object-teaching and all our new methods, 
there remains, as at the beginning, just one thing to do j 
and that is, to make the pupil lay hold of his geography- 
lesson, and his grammar-lesson, and his arithmetic- 
lesson, and learn it thoroughly. And the way to learn 
it is to commit it to memory. It is not necessary to 
worry about his understanding it. The surest way to 
understand it is to commit it to memory. If a boy 
grapple a fact with his memory, he will he in the 
direct line of grappling it with his comprehension. 
If he does not fully comprehend it at first, he will 
grow up to it. The understanding is in no other way 
so strengthened as by the stores of memory. The 
mind acts on the facts with which memory has en- 
dowed it. Judgment is based upon memory. Let us 
then be sure first that the pupil has learned his lesson. 

In trying to ascertain how vigorously and promptly 
the mind acts on what it has learned, we should not 
forget that nothing so discourages and demoralizes 



^Examination under the Microscope. 151 

children as to be asked questions which they cannot 
answer. It does not signify that they are not to blame 
for their inability. They have no discernment to tell 
them what they ought to know and what they need not 
know. They feel that the creditable thing is to an- 
swer all questions put to them ; and if they cannot 
answer them they seldom suspect there is anything un- 
fair in the question ; but they feel that they are not 
pleasing their teacher, they are mortified before their 
parents, and are made generally uncomfortable. I 
have seen a class of little boys and girls, ten and twelve 
years old, fresh faced, and beautiful in gala robes, evi- 
dently running over with knowledge which they had 
been a whole term in acquiring, and which they were 
innocently and charmingly eager to display, stand up 
before a good-natured, well-meaning gentleman who, no 
doubt, thought he was doing God service, and be 
speedily brought to shame and confusion of face be- 
cause he would not ask them of what they knew, but 
persisted in leading them by untrodden ways. It is 
true that his questions involved the principle which had 
been studied ; but it is true, also, that they implied a 
generalization which we have no right to require of 
children. 

We do not always ourselves make a brilliant foray 
into these fresh fields. If a girl of twelve, who has 
never, studied Latin, has a tolerable notion of wiTat the 



152 Examiitation under the Microscope. 

equinox is, I do not see that much is added to her store 
by being told that it comes from two Latin words mean- 
ing equal and night. There is certainly not enough 
added to compensate her for the mortification of being 
obliged, before a roomful of her mothers and aunts, to 
reply to any question, " I don't know." 

Among the birds of a certain answer in geography 
appeared the condor. 

" How large is the condor?" asked the benevolent 
gentleman. The little girl hesitated. 

" Is it a large or a small bird ?" 

"A large bird." 

''Well, how large.?" 

" The largest there is." 

Now, if it were necessary to put the question, here 
was an intelligent and sufficiently accurate answer ; and, 
if the examiner had been as wise as he was good, he 
would have given the girl a commendation, and dis- 
missed her triumphantly with honors easy. But he 
could not let well enough alone, and must needs rush 
on to his own destruction. " Cannot you tell me how 
large ?" 

No answer. 

'' As large as a calf?" As if a calf had any deter- 
minate size, and could be made a standard ! Surely the 
little girl's idea of a condor was as accurate as the 
comm*ttee-man's idea of a calf. 



Examination tinder the Mici'oscope. 153 

A little boy gave the definition of reduction, — " The 
changing of numbers from one denomination to 
another." 

" What have you left out ? " asked the committee. 

The boy paused. If he could have been permitted to 
collect his senses in silence, no doubt he would have 
found the missing link ; but the benevolent gentleman 
pursued his lucubrations. "You have left out the 
most important part of the definition. You have left 
out four words which contain the most important part 
of the definition." Of course a child of twelve cannot 
listen to a grown-up gentleman and carry on an abstract 
mental process at the same time. Adult people in 
society can sometimes assuage their sufferings in that 
way ; but it requires skill and practice. Another pupil 
supplied the deficiency, — "without changing their 
value." 

I question the fact. It seems to me that the adequate 
definition of reduction is what the boy gave ; that the 
added clause is not only not the most important part, 
but is really no part of the definition. True, the value 
is not to be changed ; but that is an extraneous matter. 
If you have changed the value of the number you have 
done something besides reduce. You may add that or 
any other negative clause to the definition, without 
destroying, but also without increasing, its accuracy. 
It remains that reduction is the changing of numbers 



154 Examinatlo7i under the Microscope, 

from one denomination to another. Is it not so, 
Monsieur Mon Frere ? 

The children's questions were answered and their 
examples performed, with promptness and correctness; 
but the ill-starred committee could not leave them their 
little triumph unmarred, must needs try to get into, and 
bring out of, their heads, that multiplication by a frac- 
tion is division. Oh ! if men would but know in this 
their day the (in some respects) narrow range of a 
child's mind ! Fractions are complicated, at best. If 
a boy can learn the mechanical processes, for heaven's 
sake let alone the "philosophy of it. If he can add 
fractions, and multiply fractions, and divide fractions, 
with ease and readiness, be content, and do not try to 
muddle them all together : it is not of the slightest use. 
This committee worked on the class till he got out the 
answers he wanted \ but he got them only by exclusion. 

It was easy to see that the right answers came only 
because the other answers had been pronounced wrong. 
One of the brightest boys in the class said succinctly 
after he got home, " Mr. Committee was wrong there. 
I looked in the book afterward." That was what his 
long and lucid explanation amounted to. Get the 
processes into the young minds, and the rationale 
will come of itself in its own good time. 

In the best of schools, a vast amount of geography, 
arithmetic, g■ra^^mar, and especially philology, must be 



JExafJzhiation tinder the Microscope. 155 

left unlearned. With the best of teachers, the cofii- 
mittee on examination-day can ask thousands of ques- 
tions which the pupils cannot answer. Some of the 
information they are incapable of grasping. A great 
deal of it is quite within their power. But time is 
limited. Many matters of interest must be slightly 
touched, and many more left untouched. A good 
teacher is the best judge of what he can do aild what 
the pupil can do. He will explain and suggest as far 
as is practicable ; but there will be many things, both 
about calves and condors, that must be left to future 
reading. Many mathematical principles must be rele- 
gated to the pupils' maturer years. It is easy for a 
committee to ask interesting questions and convey 
much valuable information : it would be equally easy 
and agreeable for the teacher to do it if you would 
give him time. But the teacher has the steady pull, 
day after day, week after week. Why should the com- 
mittee come in once or twice a term, only to divert 
the minds of pupils in presence of their parents and 
thereby put himself into contrast, perhaps unfavorable, 
to the teacher, who does all the real work ? 

" Mention three domestic animals," said a teacher. 

" A horse." 

" Yes. Now the second." 

" Another horse." ^ 

" No. I want your others to be a different kind." 



156 Exammation under the Microscope. 

-" Two cows." 

Certainly, a horse and two cows are three domestic 
animals ; but is it worth while to vex these dear little 
devious yet direct minds with complex processes ? 
Rather let us strengthen them with simplicity, with^ 
order, with routine, with small requirements rigidly 
secured, with small victories generously awarded. Let 
us be sure that a little learned by themselves is more 
worth than a great deal explained or taught by their 
teachers. The channel must be narrow, or it never 
can be either wide or deep. 



THE SUPERVISORY FEVER. 



THE SUPERVISORY FEVER. 

HAVING given such definite and valuable direc- 
tions for examinations as that they shall be 
conducted — '*5^/' the superintendent goes on to 
say that *' if the schools are not wisely examined, 
it is as well perhaps to leave them without it (?) 
altogether." The next step naturally is to limn the 
wise examiner, whose mind we discover is to be so 
liberalized by a wide range of educational reading and 
study that he will "look sharper" for merits than for 
demerits. '' He should fear only two things : he should 
fear to do injustice and he should fear himself." And if 
he " looks sharp " enough we should certainly think that 
he would fear himself. Having depicted this educational 
Spartan in terms so glow^ing that the superintendent 
himself stands before his own picture in despair of ever 
realizing it, he turns right about face and declares to 
our surprise that *' instead of saying nobody is equal 
to such a work, and therefore it must be dispensed 
with, we should rather * get the best ' and trust to the 

(159) 



l6o The Supervisory Fever. 

law of supply and demand " to do better- by and by. 
That is, we must dc the work wisely or not do it at all ; 
but if we can find no one able to do the work wisely, 
we must do the best we can ! Behold how good and 
pleasant and consistent a thing it is to have the mind 
liberalized by a wide range of educational reading and 
study ! 

And yet this examination which is so important, by 
which, "if at all, will be hastened the dawning of that 
day when there will be' no cramming, no high pressure, 
no idleness," and many other evil things which give 
great weight to the "if at all;" this examination, which 
is to do so vastly greater a work than teaching and 
which requires in the examiner a hitherto impossible 
combination of gifts and graces, is after all second to 
— what ? Not to teaching — that is servant of servants 
to its brethren — but to supervision. " This function is 
next in importance and in point of difficulty to that of 
the chief supervision, which overlooks the whole econo- 
my of the system." The examiners, momentous and 
barely and rarely possible as they are, appear after all 
but on a lower form, while the superintendent is the 
sweet little cherub that sits up aloft and " overlooks " 
the scene. 

I ought not to omit the confession that our superin- 
tendent does give one direction for conducting the 
examination. Having described what it is to do, and 



The Supervisory Pever. i6i 

the Coming Man who is to do it, it seems to occur to 
him that " as to the method and plan of procedure 
something must be said, but my limits will not permit 
details y Verily our superintendent is wise in his 
generation. He follows his own prescription. He 
fears himself. He has pages of rotund and sonorous 
description of the lofty ends to be pursued by the lofty 
examiner and prescribed to the humble teacher. But 
when it dawns upon his mind that it is desirable to give 
a little practical and definite suggestion as to the steps 
by which these are to be attained, he sweeps it grandly 
aside with the conclusive remark " My limits will not 
permit details." There is ample room for useless 
theorizing but no room for one useful hint ; with the 
single exception that the superintendent's pet notion is 
so indelibly impressed upon his brain that, without 
shattering his great ideal, he is able to stoop from his 
mount of vision long enough to give us the one subtle 
and startling " detail " that the examiner must march to 
his field of glory armed with a Form of Blank ! 

It followed inevitably that when these vague general- 
ities and these intersecting functions began to be put 
into actual operation, the clash of arms resounded. 
To carry on and carry out the notion of these intricate 
"examinations" a special Board of supervisors was 
created. But no sooner was this Board in existence, 



1 62 The Supervisory Fever, 

than all the Boarders lifted up their voices and began 
to cry aloud. 

" / want to be an angel, and with the angels stand" 
and instantly started to climb alongside the sweet little 
cherub — who naturally did not like it. He thought 
there was not more than room enough for one. He 
looked into their ascending and aspiring eyes and he 
saw already a disposition to oust him from his seat and 
set him afloat "on the world-wide sea." " The supervi- 
sors," said the cherub mournfully and apprehensively, 
" seem to have conceived that the title by which they are 
designated is equivalent to the title superintendents . . 
They have proceeded to assume the ' supervision ' of 
the schools in groups, * that the teachers may know to 
whom specially to apply when they wish for assistance 
or counsel^^ which means that they have assumed the 
functions of superintendents ... I find nothing in the 
regulations requiring or permitting the supervisors to 
exercise this function. But the superintendent is di- 
rectly commanded to exercise this function. The 
language is : 'he shall advise the teachers on the best 
methods of instruction and discipline.' It is plain 
that if six other persons may at the same time go to all 
the schools and counsel and direct in regard to these 
matters, having no responsibility to any chief, then 
there are seven persons exercising conflicting functions." 

In this fight of the functions observe how one 



The Supervisory Fcjer, 163 

function has entirely changed color under the superin- 
tendent's apparently unconscious hands. The superin- 
tendent quotes the regulations against the supervisors 
thus : " He shall advise the teachers." He quotes 
the supervisors against the regulations thus : " that the 
teachers may know to whom specially to apply when 
they wish for assistance or coufisel.''^ But making origi- 
nal comments on these regulations he says, "if six 
other persons may at the same time go to all the 

schools and cotmsel and direct there are seven 

persons exercising conflicting functions." 

Thus betwixt the masthead and the ground, the 
assistance and counsel and advice of the superintendents 
and supervisiors and regulations, guaranteed by law, 
have been gerrymandered by the superintendent into 
direction^ which is an altogether different thing and 
does not appear to have been contemplated in the 
regulations. 

But after all, the especial spectacle to which I wish to 
call attention is — the seven adult citizens at a cost of 
$25,000 or thereabouts, quarrelling as to which of them 
shall advise the teachers ! Not one of them proposes 
to go into the school-room and do the honest work of 
teaching: the sole bone of contention is which shall 
have the exclusive right to go pottering around the 
school-room to bother the teacher ; " to whom specially 
to apply when they wish for assistance or counsel'^ 



164 The Supervisory Fever, 

I venture to say the teachers wished assistance and 
counsel from none of them. I venture to say that 
the Board was created at no demand from good 
and efficient teachers. If the teachers were free to 
speak their mind they would depose and say that 
all they wanted of the Board was to stand out of 
their sunshine. It would be interesting to know how 
many teachers ever cried with a great and bitter cry, 
"give us a superintendent to reign over us !" how many 
parents of their own motion besieged the polls for a 
Board of supervisors. The superintendent admits that 
his office was created only " after prolonged and stren- 
uous opposition " and that " the regulations prescribing 
the duties of the office seemed to be designed to pre- 
vent the incumbent from doing harm, rather than to 
invest him with power to do good." This shows that 
the people made a good fight ; that they yielded only 
step by step, and that they wisely and patriotically at 
the very last tried to reduce to its lowest terms the evil 
which they could not wholly prevent. 

If there were any positive and ultimate standard of 
right and wrong in teaching, whi^h some might definitely 
attain and which all would definitely recognize, it might 
be well to set the few in high places not only to counsel 
but to direct those who walk and work below. But 
there is no such standard. As many as there are 
teachers and "educators " so many theories are there — - 



The Supervisory Fever, 165 

and the theory of the teacher is just as likely to be the 
true one as the theory of the educator. Whoever 
examines the different reports will find the theories 
of the various superintendents flatly contradicting each 
other. After the present superintendent had with 
infinite difficulty got his Board of Supervisors ordained 
for the special purpose of examination and inspection, 
he announced that the theory they had adopted was 
" radically wrong." How much better off then was the 
public for the tens of thousands of dollars they had 
spent in pursuit of inspection ? 

Another superintendent starts with a theory of fre- 
quent written examinations ; that " each examination 
shall cover all the work that has preceded it for the 
year, and in such studies as arithmetic . . . each ex- 
amination will embrace the entire subject as far as 
studied." To the slight objection that this will require 
too much of both teacher and pupil and that the pupil 
cannot be expected to keep fresh in his mind subjects 
which he studied months before, the superintendent 
airily answers, " Why ? if the pupils have been thor- 
oughly taught, and what is to be said of a system that 
tolerates anything but thorough teaching ? No subject 
should be taught in our schools with which the pupil 
should not be made so familiar in its important features 
that an examination at any time will not be deemed a 
hardship." 



1 66 The Supervisory Fever. 

Let us look at this. A class of boys learns geometry 
so well that at the close of their term they can solve 
any problem and demonstrate any theorem in the 
twelve books of Euclid at call. They leave school and 
go, one to his farm and another to his merchandise and 
except a professor or two, not one of them looks at a 
geometry book for twent}^ years. At the end of that 
time how many of them could even state the tenth 
proposition, seventh book ? Our superintendent would 
force little children to do what the grown men of col- 
leges are not required to do. Harvard University has 
very wisely instituted double examinations so that a 
boy may be examined in his studies while he is fresh 
from their pursuit and not wait till he wishes to enter 
college and be obliged to go over the whole at once. 
The plan proposed by this superintendent is so objec- 
tionable that no child ought to be sent to a school 
where it is even attempted to be practised. It imposes 
a burden on teacher and pupil which is not only fatal 
but unscholarly. The mere bugbear of such exam- 
inations is enough to scare all elasticity and buoyancy 
out of any ambitious or intellectual pupil. His work 
ceases to be a pleasurable, vigorous, and dignified com- 
mand of each day's duties rising ever more and more 
into a love of learning, and becomes a mere preparation 
for examination. No opportunity is left the teacher for 



The Supervisoj-y Pever. 167 

ingenuity or indulgence. Everything must bend to the 
demand of this outside iron examination. 

And the superintendent rather gloats over his power 
to harass and annoy the teacher. The objection that 
these examinations "cause great anxiety among the 
teachers is to my mind a recommendation. I entirely 
agree with superintendent Blank who says . . . 'that any 
system of inspection which shall occasion the teacher 
little or no anxiety must be a contemptible farce.' " 

On the contrary anxiety hinders work. Anxiety is 
the concomitant of weakness. Anxiety always implies 
something wrong. The good teacher goes to her prop- 
er work, interested, confident, cheerful, equal to her 
task, and imparts her own tone and spirit to her pupils. 
It is in this spirit that good work must be done. An 
anxious teacher is so far a weak and undesirable teach- 
er; and any man or any plan that tends to impose anxiety 
upon the teacher is a nuisance that cannot be too soon 
abolished. 

On the other hand, equally objectionable is this 
superintendent's theory that the primary school teacher 
is to make the subject seem to the pupil more like a 
story than a lesson. A teacher should aim at invigo- 
ration, not enervation. She should make her pupils feel 
not that lesson is story, that work is play, that duty is 
amusement, but that lesson in season is a better thing 
than story out of season, that work is a higher sort of 



1 68 The Stifervisoi'y Fever. 

thing than play — that duty is more satisfactory than 
amusement. Children enjoy overcoming obstacles just 
as much as grown people enjoy it and they acquire 
firmness and fibre in the act. They need of all things 
to be ^taught that a thing is not to be shirked because it 
is disagreeable, and that there is no victory like the 
solution of a stubborn problem by will and nerve. 

To illustrate the poor way in which history is taught, 
a superintendent tells of some pupils who gave a very 
full account of the difficulties met by Columbus before 
setting sail, mentioned the date of the discovery of 
America, the encouragement received from Queen 
Isabella, and all the points essential and non-essential 
to be found in the text-book. But when, not ten min- 
utes later, the superintendent asked about what time 
Queen Isabella lived, not one in the class could tell, 
and the superintendent consequently pronounces the 
exercises a failure. I should say that it was the 
superintendent who was a failure. I should be very 
much ashamed of myself, if, after a class had demon- 
strated that they knew when Columbus discovered 
America and that Queen Isabella helped him, I could 
not get out of them when Queen Isabella lived. I 
venture to say that ninety-nine out of every hundred 
teachers could do it. I venture to say that if that 
superintendent had been out of the way, the class teacher 
could have done it. The children had done their whole 



The Sufervisory Fever. 169 

duty in learning the lesson. Any good teacher by one 
or two demure questions — almost by a significant look, 
would have had every hand in the class springing up, 
every eye sparkling, every little form wriggling with 
eagerness to tell when Isabella lived. By what blunt 
address, by what wooden questioning even a superin- 
tendent could contrive to depress these young brains 
into total inaction, it is hard to imagine, but he did it 
and seems not to have the faintest surmise that it 
was his own fault ! 

. He relates another instance in another state where the 
pupil narrated with commendable accuracy the particu- 
lars of the bombardment of Boston Heights from 
Charlestown. At the close the examiner, "pleased with 
the readiness of the pupil, tested the intelligence of his 
answer by asking where this Charlestown was situated. 
' In South Carolina, sir,' was the prompt reply. This 
is a type, though it may be an exaggerated one, of a 
recitation in history." 

It is-nothing of the sort. It is a type of the stupidity 
and stolidity of a possibly intelligent man when he has 
to deal with a child's mind. Every one who is at all 
familiar with the workings of his own mind knows how 
easy it is, under a slight surprise, momentarily to forget 
a perfectly familiar fact ; how common it is not instantly 
to recognize a perfectly familiar fact presented at a new 
angle. ' * Who will open the Senate at the extra session ? '* 



i^o The Supervisory Fever. 

was asked. " The Secretary I suppose," replied anoth- 
er who knew quite well both that the Vice President 
is President of the Senate and that the Vice President 
is in office till iS8i. "Why is Mr. Davis not in the 
House ? " asked another. " He is not returned " was 
the reply of one who knew perfectly that California 
loses her representation in the House until autumn. 
If you had asked these questions directly : does the 
Vice President preside through the extra session ? does 
California choose her representatives in season for the 
extra session ? the replies would have been instantly 
accurate. But, hitting the mind at an angle, the question 
glanced off, futile. How much more easy for the 
inexperienced young mind to see all the bearings of a 
question at first glance ! 



MILK FOR BABES. 



MILK FOR BABES. 

WE have pages of school reports filled with theo- 
ries of different superintendents as to the best 
methods of teaching reading, and pages more as to 
the best method of teaching writing. But who shall 
decide which is the best? "Many excellent teachers 
advocate" each method. Let every teacher have his own 
method. There is no reason why a superintendent should 
be set over any number of teachers and impose upon them 
the method he thinks best. Most of us learned to read 
and write without any method at all. By a certain mode, 
says one superintendent, " In the course of three or four 
months the pupils are enabled to write with considera- 
ble facility sentences made up of small words." But 
here is a little girl of seven years who in the course of 
three or four weeks has learned to write sentences with 
considerable facility and with no method, except teasing 
her sisters and her cousins and her aunts to set copies 
for her and roaring with rage when she was not satis- 
fied with her efforts. Her sole advantage was that she 

(173) 



174 Milk for Babes. 

was not hampered with schools and supervision, her 
sole motive '*to catch up with Nanny!" If she had 
been tampered with by the " system " I suppose she too 
would have to drag along like the pupils aforesaid 
till " the second half of the second year" before she 
would have learned to w^rite. But left to herself, here 
is a composition which she has this moment finished 
of her own accord in the second half of the second 
month of her hap-hazard tuition : 

My cat is very pritty. And will with us play. The 
dog is black with yellow lags. The dog dose like me 
and so the cat. The dog will come when I call it. 
And so will the cat. When I tham milk gife the cat 
will begin to drink befor the dog. Then the dog will 
come out. And the cat will put her povv in the milk 
and spatter it all abuot. The dogs name is Captaif 

C . The cats name is pinafor. Miss Ely said the 

dog ought to be named ralph arid the cat josephind. 
But as I did not want to chand ther names. I let them 
stay as thay were. Thas morning the cat got into the 
market basket. In the basket thar were some stor berry 
boss. Wall the cat had got her pors on the top of the 
boss when thay fell over. 

The end. 

What our schools are for is to teach children to write, 
not to teach them to write by some particular method. 
Is it worth while to pay a superintendent three or four 
thousand dollars a year to enforce upon teachers a sys- 
tem of doubtful value ? 

A superintendent reports that "a child would probably 
spend as much time in the study of the word exploration 



Milk fo7' Babes. 1 75 

as in that of preparatloii ; and yet three hundred 
scholars belonging to different schools, writing these 
words without study, failed on ihem in the ratio of one 
to thirty-two. On the w^ords I'efreshment and especially^ 
the failures were as one to forty-six." It is truly mel- 
ancholy to see the people's money wasted in taxes to 
pay a grown man three thousand dollars a year for such 
maundering. Three hundred children are taken from 
their proper tasks and- set to writing words ordered by 
the superintendent, and the teachers of those three 
hundred pupils have to supervise the writing and exam- 
ine the papers and sum the failures — for you maybe 
sure that the superintendent reduces his own drudgery 
to its lowest terms ; and then the teachers hand in their 
lists and the full-grown man makes out the ratio and 
the city is at the cost of printing — what ? what every one 
knew before, that preparation will be oftener '' missed " 
than exploratio7i ; because the first a in preparation is 
pronounced short! 

Equally sapient are the hints for teaching arithmetic : 
*' A lessson of ten examples all in division is not so 
profitable as one which contains two examples under 
each of the preceding rules and four in division." 
But you cannot do an example in division without doing 
an example under at least two of the preceding rules, 
and you cannot prove your example in division without 
taking in the third. 



176 Milk for Babes. 

When a superintendent has swelled his report with 
all the useless information he can originate, he bor- 
rows more frqm other officials as useless as himself. 

''The supervisors of the schools of have issued 

a pamphlet entitled ' Suggestions accompanying the 
Course of Study for the Grammar and Primary Schools.' 
[Observe that they wisely make no suggestions for the 
High Schools.] These suggestions are the result of ex- 
tended experience and observation, and would be of 
permanent value to our teachers." And then follows 
the pamphlet which ought to be entitled " Pap for the 
Teachers," and which so far from being of any perma- 
nent value to the teachers are so feeble, so primitive 
so goody-goody that no teacher can be of any per- 
manent value who can be benefited by them. 

These paternal supervisors kindly caution teachers 
at the outset " against the expectation of great and 
immediate results." Teachers are so accustomed to 
see boys and girls precipitate themselves into men and 
women by the second day of school, that this caution is 
exceedingly well-timed. " The work to be accomplished 
by the several classes will depend much on the capacity 
and aptness of the teacher." The supervisors it will be 
observed are hedging at the outset, so that if their sug- 
gestions are not fruitful of good, they have the teacher 
ready led out for scapegoat. " It will of course be un- 
derstood, that, though the exercises are essentially the 



Milk for Babes, 177 

same in the several classes, they are expected to be 
progressive." That is, the highest class in school is to 
have different work to do from the lowest class. How 
fortunate that the teachers have a superintendent and 
the superintendent has supervisors from whom can be 
borrowed this valuable intelligence, this latest and most 
approved method of teaching ; that the highest and 
the lowest classes are not to be taught the same lessons ! 

" In the oral exercises pupils should be required to 
speak audibly and distinctly." Six supervisors in one 
town borrowed by the superintendent in another town 
to "suggest" to teachers that they do what every obscur- 
est teacher in the obscurest country district has been 
steadfastly doing time out of mind. 

'* As soon as pupils begin to write, care should be 
taken that every sentence should begin with a capital, 
that the word should be spelt correctly " — and sun- 
dry similar remote and recondite suggestions ; yet I 
dare say my seven-year old little maid will get her 
dog's "lags" straight just as quickly as if she had 
seven supervisors pulling at each leg. 

" At first only the most prominent objects in a picture, 
or the most obvious qualities of an object, should receive 
attention. Thus, in examining a picture in the reading- 
book, in answer to suggestive questions by the teacher, 
the pupil will say that he sees two little girls, that they 
are looking at a bird's nest, that the nest has four eggs 



178 Milk for Bah es. 

in it, and that tlie bird is sitting near by on the branch 
of the tree. 

"This, perhaps, is sufficient for the lowest class. 
At a later stage the skilful teacher will find no difficulty 
in interesting the pupil in the skill with which the nest 
is made, the beauty of the eggs and the motherly 
anxiety of the bird whose hiding-place has been discov- 
ered." 

Observe that these momentous distinctions are only 
secured by the uncertain tenure of a " perhaps." With 
all the learning of the six supervisors transported from 
their own to another city " perhaps " the heavens 
would not fall, " perhaps" our school "system" would 
not be rolled together as a scroll even if the pretty 
little eggs or the frightened little mother were pointed 
out to the lowest class ! 

We might just as wisely pay our taxes to support a 
Board to print a manual for mothers, "suggesting" 
that when the children are in long clothes it will " per- 
haps " be well to confine their arithmetic lessons to 
the attractive formula: 

" This little pig went to market 

This little pig staid at home, 
This little pig had breakfast, 

This little pig had none ; 
And this little pig went squeak, squeak, squeak." 

but that when the boy enters Harvard College he 
should, "perhaps" relinquish his seat in his mother's lap, 



Milk for Babes. 179 

and be taught to view his toes in a more anatomical 
light. 

As in the primary schools so in the grammar schools 
the work '' should be progressive, more being required 
both in thought and expression as we advance towards 
the higher classes." In only one respect do the super- 
visors apparently not expect progression : they assume 
that the teachers of the lower and the higher classes of 
the lower and higher schools make no advance in intel- 
ligence, but are equally idiotic. 

*'A teacher should set an example in reading 
naturally and intelligently .... 

" Constant care must be taken to prevent screaming, 
shouting, and drawling." — 

'' Varied and interesting methods to secure good 
spelling, and at the same time to lead pupils to a good 
choice of words in speech and writing, will occur to 
teachers." Be sure they will ; why then pay six super- 
visors % 20,000 a year to print a pamphlet to say so ? 

'' Neatness and legibility should be required in the 
written exercises." Was ever a school established in 
which the teacher labored for blots and blurs ? 

"To encourage and secure the individuality which 
ought to characterize good writing, blank books .... 
are recommended to be used." 

" Upon the lowest line of each page of the copy-book 
let the pupil write his name and age, the name of the 



i8o Milh for Babes. 

school and class, and the date when the page was com- 
pleted." 

"In studying the Constitution of the United States, 
and of Massachusetts, read the documents themselves," 
— as if, without this " suggestion" the teacher would 
teach the Constitution out of Watts' Psalms and Hymns. 

The Board like our whilom superintendent fears it- 
self, and wisely and prudently leaves the "details, and 
with some slight exceptions, methods, of teaching arith- 
metic to the wisdom and skill of the teachers them- 
selves." While it was about it, the Board might just 
as well have left the whole thing in the same safe 
place. It has, however, taken care to determine the 
general subjects and the generai order of subjects so 
as to prevent the teachers from beginning with their 
infant classes on square root, and graduating the High 
School classes with simple addition, which the teachers 
would undoubtedly do if left to their own imbecility. 

"Of the familiar principles which should determine the 
methods of teaching arithmetic, none deserve greater 
attention than the following : — 

" I . That in childhood the activities of perception 
are greater than other mental activities. 2. That- 
both single and related perceptions must be clear and 
distinct in order that the memory may do its proper 
work. 3. That the imagination and reflective powers 
of children cannot live and thrive on abstractions, but 



Milk for Babes, i8i 

must feed daily and hourly on present or recalled 
perceptions, or on conceptions that may at any moment 
be realized in thought. 4. That a cheap, third-hand 
metaphysics is of no more use in teaching a child the 
multiplication-table than a knowledge of the history 
and whereabouts of the lost tribes of Israel is essential 
to the profitable sale of a threadbare coat to the old 
clo' man." 

Any slight foreign element in these " suggestions " 
"may at any moment be realized in thought." The 
.supervisors are guilty of great neglect of duty in not 
telling the teachers how many hours a day they ought 
to give " attention" to these ''familiar principles," 
and what particular form their " attention " should take, 
and at what hour the devotion should begin. Shall the 
teachers say a sort of early mass at six o'clock in the 
morning, or would it be well to have a muezzin call 
from the church steeples at high noon, or shall the 
teachers squat cross-legged on prayer-rugs at the ring- 
ing of the curfew bell in speechless contemplation of 
the stupendous principle " that, as thought involves 
a consciousness of identity, similarity, or difference, 
and as these relations are the basis of thought in num- 
bers, but cannot be clearly conceived in an ' abstract ' 
form by children, there should be, at the very start, and 
during the study of elementary arithmetic, exercises 
which involve the perception of the relations of num* 
16 



1 83 Milk for Babes. 

bered objects ?" When laws to this effect are introduced 
into our revised statutes, I trust our tired teachers will 
improve the time allotted to this " attention " and 
calmly lie down on their prayer-rugs and go to sleep, 
for it is only a cumbrous and stilted abstraction of the 
lively little concrete which we all tripped along in our 
early days : If Mary had one cherry in one hand and 
two in the other, how many cherries had she in both ? 

Under the head of "Miscellaneous" we have the 
comfortable supervising "suggestion" that "the half 
hour under this head is also meant to provide the 
teachers with a few comparatively spare moments in 
which they can attend to various details." That is, 
having sawed logs all day they can be allowed the 
"miscellaneous" half hour to chop a little brush for 
fun ! Did it ever occur to these six supervisors that a 
teacher, left to himself, might possibly plan a few 
comparatively spare moments in which to execute his 
comparatively unimportant details without borrowing 
the brains of a sister city, or even having a Board 
organized to impend over him ? 

It is enough to drive teachers wild to be subjected to 
such insensate impertinence ; and to reflect that while 
they are paid five or six or seven hundred dollars a 
year for real work, these wiseacres get three or four 
thousand for their incomprehensible fatuity. 

And yet I am far from blaming these superinten- 



Milk for Babes. 1S3 

dents and supervisors. They are doubtless well- 
meaning men and women. They design to be honest 
and harmless. They wish to earn their salaries. The 
only trouble is that they are supernumeraries. The 
only trouble is that there is nothing for them to do. 
The real work of schools is teaching. To create offices 
outside is to reduce officers to these pitiable devices to 
do something that looks like work. The public may be 
imposed upon by these sober and decorous shams, 
these phantasms of work — but the teachers are not. 
The teachers laugh at them. The teachers know that 
these stately and formal "Suggestions" are the very 
truisms and platitudes of teaching and have gone with- 
out saying from the time when the memory of man 
runneth not to the contrary. But take never so good a 
man and put him in receipt of a good salary — in a 
position where he is supposed to have something to do 
and where there is really nothing to do, and he will 
make violent and probably ridiculous efforts to do some- 
thing. The chances are that something will be mis- 
chief ! 



OFFICIAL SUPERVISION 

AND 

PERSONAL SUPERVISION 



OFFICIAL SUPERVISION 
AND PERSONAL SUPERVISION. 

IF it be said that suggestions from the supervisors 
and superintendents are but a small part of their 
work : that the main thing is to secure good teaching, 
to keep teachers up to their work ; to see that only good 
teachers are employed, and that poor ones are pre- 
vented or dismissed, I reply that in this also their work 
is fallacious, fictitious, phantasmal. It must ever 
be borne in mind that a school is not a factory. 
The work of a school is not mechanical. If tile- 
drain pipes do not stand the required strain they 
fly apart under the inspector's test and may be re- 
turned on the contractor's hands. But there is no 
exact mechanical test by which teaching can be judged, 
nor do we even approximate a test by appointing a 
supervisor or a superintendent. We do in theory. 
We do in the school reports. In actual practice we do 
not ; on the contrary we go a step backwards. The chil- 
dren are the truest reporters, the parents are the only 

(187) 



1 88 Official and Personal Supervision. 

trustworthy supervisors. In the country districts where 
we have neither Boards nor supervision, where the only 
examination is intrusted to the wisdom, prudence, and 
skill of the committee man, we know in a week whether 
the teacher is good or good-for-nothing. We never 
trouble ourselves about a Board of examiners, but I 
never heard of a town meeting in the vestry appoint- 
ing for the examining committee a man who was not 
equal to the task of examining the teacher. It is 
generally the minister, or the lawyer, or the doctor. 
It is, I think without exception, a man competent to the 
work — and very seldom is a teacher appointed who is 
intellectually disqualified, disqualified in any way that 
an examination could develop. When the teacher fails 
it is because he has not the teaching tact — that no 
examination could discover. It is just as practicable, 
just as easy, and just as imperative for parents in the 
city to supervise the schools, as it is for parents in the 
country. The child's talk, habits, interest in school 
are the signs by which to detect the character of his 
teaching — not the appointment of a man and the pages 
of a report. If parents think that, by the delegation 
of their duties and the payment of a salary, these duties 
are performed, the children must pay the penalty. Un- 
less the parents do it, no one is doing it. It is not 
done. The parejit relinquishes the responsibility for 
the teaching of his child to the superintendent. The 



Official and Personal Supervision. 189 

superintendent is a man. Most of the teachers are 
women. All that the women have to do then is to 
address tliemselves to the superintendent. It matters not 
how poor a teacher a woman is, if she can get into the 
good graces of the superintendent; and the ease with 
which she can do this and her ability to do it have no 
relation whatever with her ability to teach. 

The artful woman, the insinuating woman, the woman 
who flatters the superintendent, the woman who minis- 
ters to his indolence, or the woman who thinks him 
worth her wiles — and these women are not neces- 
sarily bad women : they may be very mzo, and good 
women — these women are quite as likely to be held in 

high esteem of men superintendents as are the experi- 

•i 

enced, conscientious and effective teachers, whose first 
thought is their pupils, and not themselves nor a super- 
intendent. 

In theory, on the pages of the scjiool report the 
superintendent is a virtuous abstraction, seeking only 
the welfare of the community, separating the wheat 
from the tares with prompt and uncompromising fidelity 
and with an omniscient discrimination. As a matter 
of fact, he is only a man and entirely a man. Viewed 
in the most amiable light, he does not wish to be odious 
to the masters, he wishes to stand well with the women ; 
he does not wish to be at loggerheads with the commit- 
tee, to involve the community in warfare. He does 



190 Official and Personal Sitfcrvision. 

not wish to assume unpleasant responsibility nor 
endanger his own election and salary*. He longs 
to have everything go smoothly and without censuring 
observation. The parents have given their duty 
over into the hands of the superintendent, and they 
are not' likely to trouble him. The women can gen- 
erally lead him to see whatever they wish him to 
see. So the report comes out and the committee 
compliments the superintendent and the superintendent 
compliments the committee and they both compliment 
the teachers and we all congratulate ourselves on the 
success of our common school S3^stem. But the incom- 
petent, the uneducated, the uncouth, the false and flim- 
sy, the sham and showy teachers remain in school all 
the same. 

How is it with the private schools ? Exeter and Ando- 
ver, Ipswich, and South Hadley, the great schools of the 
past and the present — do they or did they have a 
superintendent and a Board of examiners and pages of 
essays on the method of appointment and inspection and 
examination ? Who examined Miss Mitchell of Vassar 
and Miss Cowles of Farmington to see whether they 
were competent? Who supervised Miss Stanwood of 
Elmira to insure her adoption of the latest and most im- 
proved methods of instruction? Who keeps tally of Presi- 
dent McCosh's headaches and absences or latenesses in 
his class attendance ? I never heard — no private school 



Official and Perso7zal Stipervisio7i. 191 

ever heard of this machinery from the foundation of 
the world. The men whose schools are not supported 
by government, but whose existence depends upon their 
excellence, — these men keep their eyes upon their own 
pupils and upon the world at large. When they see a 
desirable teacher either trained up in their own classes 
or looming up in some other quarter, they grab him. 
That is all the process there is. And when they have 
their teacher, he works in with the others and the 
whole is a self-moving, self-adjusting, self-regulating 
machine. If the teacher is a good teacher he gener- 
ally stays as long as he can be kept* Of course 
mistakes are made, private schools as well as public 
schools being conducted by mortal men ; but the private 
schools, without any machinery whatever for outside 
supervision, secure just as good teachers with the whole 
matter in the sole charge of the teachers, as do the 
public schools with all their cumbrous, costly and com- 
plicated machinery. The schools and academies are 
in charge of trustees who make no pretence of being 
"educators," who are ministers, lawyers, merchants, 
rich men of business, and who leave to the teachers the 
whole internal arrangements of the school, its supervis- 
ion, superintendence, recitations, examinations and 
inspection of both teachers and pupils. These schools 
whose teachers are selected without method or machin- 
ery, without any test of examination, these schools whose 



192 Official a7id Personal Supervision, 

success depends solely upon their excellence and whose 
excellence is attested solely by common report, by the 
talk, the scholarship, the habits and manners of tlie 
pupils and the standing of the teachers in society, are 
as good schools in every respect as the public schools 
about which we have this incessant din and roar and 
rattle of supervising and examining machinery. Nay, 
the position of the teachers in private' schools is so 
much better, so much more dignified, independent, 
manly and womanly than in the public schools, that the 
private schools are constantly attracting the best teach- 
ers and the public schools are tending more and more 
to be taught only by menials. The arrogance and 
ignorance of school ofiicers in those parts of our country 
most over-ridden by the " System " are so great that no 
lady or gentleman would enlist as a teacher under them 
unless compelled by necessity. So long as public school 
teachers are subjected to "management," so long as 
the state employs men to "manage the teachers," so 
long as the teachers are counted an inferior class who 
are to report and submit to a superior outside class 
called supervisors or superintendents or examiners or 
inspectors, while the teachers of private schools are 
selected and sought for their reputation, are treated like 
ladies and gentlemen, like women and men who have 
self-respect and professional pride, and not like lip- 
servants, so long will you have and will tend more and 



Official and Personal Supervision. 193 

more to have the ladies and gentlemen, scholars and 
specialists, in the private schools ; while the public 
schools will be given over to mediocrity and machinery, 
to uncultivated minds, to ungentle manners, to a low and 
subservient spirit. All our school " system " is gradu- 
ally and not slowly taking our children out from the 
influence and impress of mental and spiritual individual 
strength and subjecting them only to servile labor. 

A few examples will give an idea of the value of a 
report. On one page of a report the high school is 
complimented — I think high schools are generally com- 
plimented — with the statement that "at the annual 
examination the report of the members of the full 
Board was for the most part such as to give the highest 
credit both to teachers and pupils." Sixteen pages 
afterwards the reporter had forgotten his desire to com- 
pliment the high school teachers in his desire to advo- 
cate a higher standard of admission to the high school 
rather than an enlargement of the high school build- 
ing, and he inconsiderately argues : " By this policy 
.... the valuable and costly services of its teachers 
would be no longer wasted on scholars incapable of 
profiting by them." But what had become of those 
incapable scholars, where away had those wasted efforts 
been tucked when the reporter was reflecting "the 
highest credit " both on teachers and pupils ? 

In their report the committee declare with imposing 



194 Official and Personal ^7(pe7'vision. 

stateliness that ''it is impossible to overestimate tlie 
services of our superintendent, who maintains the 
balance between the past and the future which befits 
his office, being at once wisely conservative and cau- 
tiously progressive, never forsaking a method or usage 
till he can replace it by a better, never taking a step in 
advance till he knows precisely where his footfall will 
be. As an intermediary between school and school, 
and between the several schools and the sub-committees 
in charge of them, he is constantly communicating 
important information, facilitating hopeful experiment, 
quickening the march of improvement, and hastening 
the settlement of all questions of management and 
discipline that demand authoritative interposition." 

I defy any person to read this description of his char- 
acter and functions without being impressed with the 
majesty and might of the superintendent. It is there- 
fore all the more surprising, it is " positively shocking," 
to go on to the next paragraph and find, when you come 
down to those dangerous things called " details," that 
the only thing worth mentioning which the superin- 
tendent has actually done, the one thing of sufficient 
magnitude to be lifted out of obscurity into the publicity 
and prominence of report, by a committee that for- 
mally declares at the outset its design of offering only 
such suggestions " as may be deemed of sufficient 
importance to be made public," — is that "he has dis- 



Official and Personal Supervision. 195 

tributed among the schools large numbers of cards, 
some containing fresh materials, others with cuttings 
from books, periodicals, and newspapers, pasted on 
them " for the reading classes ! Truly it must be im- 
possible to overestimate the services of a man employed 
at two or three thousand dollars a year to cut out news- 
paper scraps and paste them on a card ! With what a 
solemn sense of responsibility must he open his morning 
journal, holding himself in wisely conservative suspense 
over the poet's corner or the column of anecdotes, 
till he knows precisely where his footfall will be, then 
winding in with his cautiously progressive scissors and 
winding out as an intermediary between school and 
school, maintaining the balance between glue-pot and 
scrap-book which befits his office and constantly com- 
municating to the teachers such important information 
as is hidden from the v/ise and prudent press and pupil 
and is revealed only to superintending babes ! 

Unluckily the report affirms instantly that " in some 
of the primary schools the teachers have carried into 
execution the sanie plan, cutting up story-books and 
numbers of 'The Nursery, and constructing by means 
of them series of cards for the use of their classes." 
Does not the terrible suspicion immediately arise in the 
ingenuous mind that possibly the services of the superin- 
tendent may have been over estimated ; that possibly 
the teachers might have been safely left to cut up their 



196 Official and Personal Supervision. 

own Nurseries and paste their own scrap-books, and 
fetch and carry their own gossip between school-house 
and school-house ? 

It may perhaps be impertinent and unimportant to 
suggest here a faint query whether it be not a sort of 
wantonness to cut up and mutilate story-books and 
Nurseries for the sake of pasting school-room cards. 
The -reading-books in schools are themselves nothing 
but extracts selected for reading — pasted cards on a 
large scale. If the pupils have learned to read well 
these books, have they not learned as much about 
reading as their short and few school-days can afford ? 
If the teacher desires something more, can she not 
bring the books and the Nurseries, whole, to her class 
and thus give them extra lessons in reading, without at 
the same time giving them a lesson in waste, and with- 
out marring the deference due to books ? 

For Round Robin reasoning, I will match the follow- 
ing school report with anything that can be produced 
outside our Solar " System." 

"During the larger part of the year, the absence of the 
principal [of a High School] has demonstrated at once 
the worth of his services, and the ability and faithfulness 
of those on whom the chief charge of the institution 
devolved " during his absence. 

" For the whole of this period Mr. Lancaster dis- 
charged the duties of acting principal, in addition to 
17 



Official and Personal Supervision. 197 

those belonging to his office as a classical teacher ; and 
to his energy and efficiency, [etc., etc.,] it is mainly due 
that the classes showed no appreciable deficit in the 
quality or quantity of their work. The principal has 
now resumed his charge with . . . reasonable hope 
that he may continue his duties without further inter- 
ruption. 'This we earnestly desire His work 

as principal can be fully estimated only by its sus- 
pension." 

That is, the school goes on just as well without him 
as with him. 

Therefore, he is indispensable to the school ! 

The value of a principal's services are demonstrated 
by the fact that a sub-teacher can do them all in addi- 
tion to his own work ! 

A principal's work can be fully estimated only by its 
suspension, during which suspension the school goes 
on exactly the same as if the principal were going on 
with it ! 

I have long suspected that the principal of a school 
was the least important officer in it. I am now almost 
ready to believe that he should take his place with the 
superintendent, supervisor, and other supernumeraries 
outside of it ! I do not believe there was another 
teacher in that high school whose duties the assistant 
could have discharged for nearly a year in addition to 
his own. I do not believe there is a sub-teacher in a 



198 Official ajzd Personal Stcpei'vision. 

grammar school whose work could be perfectly well 
done, whose classes could be just as well taught during 
a year's absence, by a fellow-assistant in addition to her 
own. 

If an energetic and effective female assistant in 
grammar or high school were attacked with a month- 
long bronchitis, principal and superintendents and 
supervisors and training-school would swarm in fifteen 
minutes after a substitute, sooner than think of not 
having one; but in our magnificent "system" the 
principal is getting to be so mere a figure-head that 
almost any teacher can pose for him. Said a lively 
sub-master when asked to subscribe for a bust of his 
principal. " I will pay the whole sum if you will put in 
the marble as substitute. It would be just as useful !" 

I fear that our principals and superintendents and 
committees are falling into the slme snare that besets 
our sister States. Commissioner Watson of the New 
York Board of education laments "that widespread 
entanglement of detail which makes the administration 
of the school system from the superintendent's ofHce 
so closely resemble a mutual admiration society." 

We have always understood that the mutual admira- 
tion society had its origin in Boston, but it was supported 
entirely by private munificence. It was never in the 
pay of the State. 

I recommend to all who worship our school " sy?- 



Official and Personal Supervision. 199 

tem," to all who take their opinions of its excellence 
from school reports and school boards, the testimony 
of commissioner Watson that superintendent Kiddle 
" has really the making of 3,000 teachers and the 
control of the army of 100,000 children. He has 
been over thirty years in the school system here and is 
something of an autocrat. The Board were, to a man, 
I think, his friends. His election last October was gen- 
eral and unanimous." 

I recommend to them then to read superintendent 
Kiddle's book on spiritualism and to reflect that for 
thirty years the teachers of New York have been made 
subject to the mind which produced that book ! It is 
only lately that this mind has been led or left to give a 
sign by which the world should know its quality, but 
it has been the same mind all the time and all the 
way. 



ON THE WORLD-WIDE SEA. 



ON THE WORLD-WIDE SEA. 

WHEN our superintendents leave their " compre- 
hensive and efficient work " of forming blanks 
at home, to embark on the world-wide sea of public- 
school study, what do they bring back from the voyage ? 
A fresh stock of " system," nothing else. The State 
school superintendents convened in Washington and 
their announced programme was that "the session 
will continue several days, and will devote most 
of the time to considering and discussing questions 
now pending before Congress which have a bearing upon 
the educational interests of the country. Among the 
most important of these are the propositions to distrib- 
ute the proceeds from the sale of public lands among 
the States for educational purposes, the establishment 
of a national educational museum, and the strengthen- 
ing of the national bureau of education." 

All of which means the creation of new offices and 
the payment of new salaries for gingerbread work. It 
does not mean that a single efficient teacher will 

(203) 



204 On the World-wide Sea. 

have his salary raised, that a single inefficient teacher 
will 'be displaced by a vigorous and efficient one, or 
that a single languid young brain will be stimulated 
into heartier exercise. 

Then they talked about industrial schools and the 
metric system and southern education and foreign 
fashions, and they listened to the Supreme Court and 
visited the President and went home. 

But meanwhile the teachers, the real workers, had 
been hard at it all the time in their schoolrooms. 

One gentleman read, we are informed, a paper on 
Education in Switzerland. At another meeting of a 
State Association, a superintendent surveyed the foreign 
field and declared that " the amount of money which is 
paid for popular education in Massachusetts is so much 
that, in that respect, Massachusetts stands foremost in 
the world." 

This may very well be, but the amount of money 
expended on schools is no criterion of the excellence of 
the schools. The school system of Massachusetts, with 
all its supervision and all its superintendence, and all 
its expensiveness, is so ineffective, it so magnifies and 
nourishes itself, and so neglects, not to say dwarfs, the 
pupils, that a child may go through the whole course 
from primary to high school inclusive without a single 
absence or tardiness and receive his diploma of gradu- 
ation, and come out thoroughly illiterate, absolutely 



On the World-wide Sea. 205 

uneducated, absolutely untrained — with no accomplish- 
ment except slang, with no taste above dime novels, 
with neither brain nor nerve nor muscle braced for the 
battle of life. This I have seen, and seeing it was 
what first directed my attention to our school " system." 

The taxes of the people go to fatten " organization " 
and the children suffer. 

*' If Massachusetts is to bear the position it now 
sustains," says a superintendent bringing his sheaves 
with him from "the world-wide ^eld," "the German 
system of pedagogy must be adopted." " Another 
lack in Massachusetts is a systematic organization of 

the school system a thorough revision of the 

school laws should be made, and this never can be 
without studying the school law of Austria, a master 
work of master minds. It contains a guide to be 
observed by every schoolmaster. All their schools have 
connected systematic organization. 

" In Prussia provisions are made for all the machin- 
ery." "In Germany where they undertake to build 
school-houses they do not take the whim of some upstart 
architect, backed up by some committee on buildings, 
that never saw anything but a district school-house. 
They have a regular official architect, who must be a 
good man in his line, and he, in consultation with those 
who know what a school-house should be, plans a proper 
one." 



2o6 071 the Woi'ld-widc Sea. 

It would hardly be possible for a superintendent to 
make a more perfect and more pitiable display of his 
ignorance, his narrowness, his utter unfitness for his 
position than this. He goes abroad with but one idea — 
" System." He comes home with that idea intensified. 
He never dreams of inquiring whether the Swiss, the 
Austrian, the Prussian citizen, be a freer, stronger, 
more intelligent, more upright man than our own. The 
village people, of their own will and choice, employing 
the village carpenter to build as good a school-house 
as they can command, may elicit the sympathizing re- 
spect of a de Tocqueville ; but this comprehensive and 
efficient school superintendent sees in it only an upstart 
architect and an ignorant committee, and reserves all his 
admiration for that paternal government which chooses 
the architect and builds the school-houses and tells the 
people how long to go and what to do after they come 
out ! A very fine influence this to shape the minds of 
our young republicans. 

The Rev. Leonard Woolsey Bacon, who I believe was 
never sent out by the "System" into the world-wide sea 
of public school education, but made the plunge on his 
own private and personal account has, in a single cas- 
ual newspaper column, showed a more comprehensive 
and real insight into the nature and needs of education 
than all the schoolmasters together. I beg pardon of 
the schoolmasters — I mean the educators. He says: 



On the World-%vide Sea. 207 

My friend, the village pastor near my house just out- 
side of Geneva, looked puzzled when I told him that, 
on the American plan of public education, we had worse 
schools and better education than in Switzerland — 
that our average boy gets far inferior instruction, -and 
our average man knows a great deal more. But it was 
true, nevertheless ; and before we got through with the 
subject, I believe he saw the point of it. 

Their system of public education is the pride o^ 
Geneva. It begins with the primary school, and cul- 
minates in the university with its many faculties for all 
departments of science, and its technical schools for 
fine and useful arts. And the system, down to the 
organization of the primary school of the poorest and 
remotest peasant village of the little canton, is operated 
and directed from the Bureau of Public Instruction in 
the Hotel de F///*? at Geneva. Consequently, it is well 
directed. Teachers are appointed, books and apparatus 
purchased, courses of study determined, at the centre 
of government of the tiny State, by experienced officials, 
under the direction of a member of the executive 
council ; and it "goes without saying" that the work 
is better done than if it were in the hands of local 
committees in each village, predisposed to the encour- 
agement of native talent. All the dignity of the gov- 
ernment is brought to bear to sustain- the prestige of 
the schools. 

How excellent is this school organization, both in 
the city high schools and in the ordinary school of a 
country village, I have reason gratefully to testify; and 
I could not but acknowledge to my friend, the pastor, 
that this work of the Bureau of public instruction was 
far better done than that of the average " school- 
deestrick " committee in America, and that the apparent 
working of the school was more effective. Yet there is 
no mistake about it — the people are nothing like so \ve.\\ 
educated a people. This is obvious in their very faces, 
but also in a hundred more statistical forms of evidence; 



2o8 On the World-wide Sea. 

as, for instance, in the annual examination of the militia 
recruits, who consist of all able-bodied young men 
arriving at a certain age. The number of these who 
have forgotten, from disuse, the very rudiments of their 
school-learning, is so large as to have become a sub- 
ject of anxious consideration to the friends of popular 
education. 

'^ But,'' asks my friend, the pastor, " wherein lies the 
difference ? We have the same free institutions. Lib- 
erty and equality are perhaps more emphatically built 
into the basis of our constitution than of yours. Every 
man has the stimulus of an unlimited career open 
before him here as with you. It is not strange that in 
a State like Prussia, for all its superb and ubiquitous 
school system, the growing peasant should relapse into 
stupid illiteracy, simply from lack of use. But Switz- 
erland is a free country, if any is. Every man has his 
share in the affairs of the country." 

"Yes," said I, "in the affairs of the country, and 
that is all ; not in the affairs of the town, and parish, 
and local school. Suppose that your peasants here had 
it on their hands to see to it that the village school was 
what it ought to be, and should begin to find it impor- 
tant that their children should have as good advantages 
as their neighbors'; do you not think there would be a 
different state of things in the village ?" 

" I do, indeed," thought the pastor, "and a pretty 
mess it would be !" 

" I have no doubt you are right. Things would get 
sadly mixed. When it came to appointing a new teacher, 
the jury of the vicinage would not be reliable for an 
intelligent verdict. On the subject of the course and 
methods of study, they would not be clear in their 
views. I cannot picture to myself the agents of 
Hachette, and Firmin Didot, and the other great pub- 
lishers, going about to the members of the village school 
committee to urge the superior merits of their respec- 
tive idiool geographies, or approaching the leading 



On the World-wide Sea, 2oc^ 

farmers of the neighborhood with arguments on the 
excellence of the Pestalozzian or inductive method, as 
represented in their new French grammar. There is 
no doubt that this kind of direction would be bad for 
your village school, and still worse for the school sys- 
tem of the canton. It would break up its beautiful 
symmetry and set everything at sixes and sevens. 
But it would do more than the finest organization can 
do to accomplish the ends for which schools and school 
systems exist. It would give you, by and by, what we 
have in America, a farm and village population capable 
of directing the schools of their own children. Your 
people have not faith in the American principle that it 
is better for a community to manage its own affairs and 
do it badly, than to have them well managed from out- 
side. Your democracy is of the French type, which 
does not go much beyond giving to all the people a 
voice in creating a central administration, which then 
absorbs into itself all conduct of local affairs, instead 
of leaving them to the people locally interested in 
them." 

And so with many words, scarce persuaded I my 
Swiss brother that our better education in America was 
owing, not indeed to our worse school system, but to 
the things which make our school system worse. 

I need add nothing to this. It touches the very heart 
of our national life. But our schoolmaster abroad 
never so much as saw it. He saw only " the system." 
He never glanced at the men behind the system. He 
plunged headlojag into monarchism, centralization, 
paternal government. We must have German pedagogy 
or we are lost. We must have a government ar- 
chitect to build our school-houses for us or we are a 
laughing-stock, The very pride and pith of our civili- 



2IO On tJie World-wide Sea. 

zation, the one thing alone which differences us from 
all other nations, the underlying principle of self-govern- 
ment on which we are still hardly past the stage of 
experiment, this comprehensive and efficient school 
superintendent scornfully swept away without even 
knowing it ! 

A great deal is said about the awards granted by the 
Expositions and the various "exhibits" made of popu- 
lar education at the Centennial. There can be no 
exhibits made of popular education except the exhibit 
of the citizens whom this popular education educates. 
We have had a glimpse of the falseness of such exhibits 
as were made, but no exhibits can be conclusive. 
The results of the schools are not to be found in 
maps and drawings, in graphic charts or wooden 
models, in blackboards and school-houses, blanks or 
funds. It is in the brains and hearts of the boys 
and girls who draw the maps and sit in the chairs 
and write on the blackboards j it is in the integrity and 
self-reliance, the firmness and faith and judgment and 
justice of the men and women that those boys and girls 
will become. Can you carry this work to the exhibition 
and cet it on a shelf and attach to it^a label and award 
it a prize? The "system" was exhibited, I grant. 
But who loves the " system" ? It is a great, cumbrous, 
costly, crushing structure shutting out from teachers and 
children the free light and air, the full swing and play 



On the World-wide Sea. 3ii 

of powers. We respect and compassionate the teach- 
ers. We love the boys and girls. 

"The foreign display of maps, models, and other 
apparatus for illustrative teaching," says one of the 
assistant commissioners at the exhibition, " was far in 
advance of anything of the like kind in the American 
exhibit. Germany, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, and 
the Dominion of Canada were especially worthy of 
mention in this regard. It would, however, have added 
much to the value of the exhibits of these countries, if 
they had shown more students^ work — most of them hav- 
ing done nothing at all in this direction. Even the little 
that was shown, if we may except this class of work in 
the Japanese and Swiss departments, and the industrial 
drav/ing in the Swedish — was of no considerable merit." 
Exactly. An admirable system. Everything to do with 
and everything provided by government, but the trifling 
matter of what was done chiefly left out and the small 
part left in, good for nothing ! 

Again, in the exhibit of school-houses, another com- 
missioner says : " It is to be regretted that the different 
cities and states gave themselves almost exclusively to 
the display of ^h^ photograph views, etc*, of the build- 
ings, and that very few were so thoughtful as to bring 
out those features of school-houses and the appurte- 
nances thereto which must always be serious problems 
to schoolmen. In this respect architects were freely 



212 On the^ World-wide Sea. 

represented — the f radical inafiagers of schools scarce- 
ly claimed any attention, even the models of the school- 
houses were defeccive, in that they did not expose for 
ready and convenient inspection the internal arrange- 
ments for the accommodation of pupils and teachers." 
Certainly not. One of the last things which our 
elaborate " system " takes into account is the accom- 
modation of pupils and teachers. It unconsciously 
represented itself with far greater accuracy by showing 
to the world at Philadelphia photographic views of the 
outside of school-houses ! 

Even about these school-houses which were exhibited, 
our doctors disagree : " The school-houses in Germany 
are as much better than we have as can be imagined," 
says one school superintendent. "But when we turn 
to the school-house," says another, " the contrast is 
greatly in our favor. . . . The display of perspective 
drawings, photographs, and especially of well-construct- 
ed models of American school buildings, was certainly 
unexcelled by that of any foreign nation. In the 
number and size of school buildings in proportion to 
our population, we are probably far in advance of any 
other nation ^-epresented at Philadelphia." 

So that if we should give up our "upstart architect," 
and have recourse to the " German system of pedagogy " 
and a "regular official architect," we should still be 
likely to have as many quarrels among those "who 



On the World-'ivlde Sea. 213 

know what a school-house should be," as we have now 
among those who "never saw anything but a district 
school-house." 

At the late Paris exhibition our educational depart- 
ment has been lauded in the highest terms — I am far 
from saying unjustly. I have no doubt that great 
energy and skill were brought to bear on the presenta- 
tion. But the superintendent himself says : " Educa- 
tional literature — by which I mean all printed matter 
bearing directly on education — was by far the most 
important part of our exhibition." That of itself 
shows that a very large part of the "most important 
part of our [educational] exhibition " was trash. " Our 
aim was to secure from each State complete sets of 
educational reports, and copies of all text-books, issued 
by contemporary American publishers for elementary 
and secondary instruction." Think of the quantity of 
rubbish piled up in that little 22 x 25 room ! For no 
matter how good the " educational literature " and " the 
copies of all text-books "may have been, one of our 
school superintendents says in his "Report:" "To so 
great an extent is the abuse of books carried that one is 
almost driven to say that they are one of the great ob- 
stacles in the way of even a tolerable knowledge of 
history." And the latest school report of the leading 
city of the solar system goes far beyond history and 
recommends the sweeping away of text-books altogeth- 
18* 



214 On the World-zuide Sea, 

er and the adoption of object-teaching. So we have 
the imposing spectacle of " by far the most important 
part of our exhibition " consisting in exhibiting a depart- 
ment of our "system" which the highest authorities 
have already discarded. As if our mechanics had 
carried spinning wheels, and Tiffany, a silver " turnip" 
watch ! 

In summing up the " success of the exhibits " the 
superintendent of the educational department himself 
says, "Perhaps no exhibit excited more attention than 
that of the higher education of women, represented by 
Vassar, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke and the Georgia 
College at Rome." Every one of which I believe is a 
school founded and conducted by private benevolence, 
private munificence, private patronage, and has no more 
connection with our public school system than have 
the parochial schools of the Jesuits ! 

"Belgium," continues our superintendent, "devoted 
much time and money to its exhibition. Liberal pro- 
visions have been made for normal schools on a grand 
scale, and technical schools receive the same promi- 
nence as in France. There are capital schools for 
teaching weaving. The exhibition of bonnets and 
complete dresses made in schools was unique. Belgium 
also has schools for teaching women to design and to 
make artificial flowers. Ten years ago Jules Simon 
said that the majority of Belgians could not read, a 



071 the World-wide Sea. 215 

fact proving them to be below the French, twenty-seven 
per cent, of whom according to the same authority were 
equally illiterate." 

Now let us group our facts and our inferences : 

France and Belgium, m the very fore front of Europe 
where normal schools are a part of the system and have 
been going on at full tide for more than a hundred 
years, and now number nearly a thousand, contain a 
population of whom twenty-seven per cent, in France, 
and more than fifty per cent, in Belgium cannot read. 
In New England, which has had normal schools but a 
little while and whose normal schools are still few in 
number, a native born American who cannot read is so 
rare as to make no appreciable per cent. 

France and Belgium have industrial schools in full 
operation, "which" says one superintendent "excel 
anything we have ever yet dreamed of." The United 
States have, to the best of my knowledge and belief, no 
industrial schools at all. "The United States, though 
the last to enter the lists, though restricted in time, space, 
expenditure, and exhibits," ancf though three thousand 
miles away, while " France made extraordinary efforts " 
and Belgium " devoted much time and money," and 
both were close at hand — the United States "took 
proportionately more awards than any other nation ! " 

The one principle on which our State was founded, 
the one idea which distinguishes us from the old nations, 



2i6 On the World-wide Sea. 

the one advance which makes our government an exper- 
iment, is the principle of individual development by 
individual effort, the least possible government interfer- 
ence, the greatest possible individual freedom. The 
experiment has so far been brilliantly successful. The 
people have educated themselves better than they have 
been educated by kings. Why should we relinquish 
our experiment ? Why should we depart from our prac- 
tice? Without industrial schools we took more 
industrial prizes, without normal schools we have 
better education than the nations which have both. 
Shall we now turn about and adopt their methods, or 
press on to greater conquests in our own ? 



PURIFICATION 
BY SUPERVISION. 



PURIFICATION BY SUPERVISION. 

BLIND to facts, bent on theories, the movement is 
still towards more superintendents, more super- 
vision. It is not good teachers and good teaching 
that our "system" craves. It is not teachers with 
sense and skill, pupils with brains and blood ; but " a 
most thorough supervision over our schools is most 
necessary." "The west is outstripping New England 
in educational progress, because they employ a system 
of supervisors." It is not simply supervisors that we 
are clamoring for now, but a system of supervisors ! 
We even ramify out into intricate ' ingenuities. A 
county and state system of supervision should be insti- 
tuted, but we are relieved by finding that " a majority 
of the counties would need but one superintendent 
while some of the larger might require two or three " 
and the Legislature is besought to make provision for 
the appointment of these officers. " Of the 23,000 public 
school teachers in Ohio," says the State Commissioner, 
"at least 10,000 are as utterly unfit to teach children as 

(219) 



220 Purification by Supervision. 

to practise law, but with intelligent, skilled, and honest 
supervision there might be hope." 

What reason, I ask, is there to hope or believe that 
supervision will be any more intelligent, honest, or 
skilled than teaching ? The supervisors and the teachers 
must come from the same source, — the people. The 
Ohio commissioner says that at least fifty per cent, of 
the public school teachers of Ohio are unfit to teach 
and that it is because the people who elect school officers 
are careless, or indifferent in the matter of choosing ; 
that the selection of candidates is too often a question 
of availability rather than fitness. But how is this 
criminal carelessness in the selection of school officers 
going to be corrected by giving the people more officers 
to select? Of the % 4,957,254 paid to the public school 
teachers of Ohio, the commissioner declares % 2,000,000 
to be worse than thrown away on incapable teachers 
who are employed by criminally indifferent or destruc- 
tively ignorant boards.of education. Now what guar- 
antee have the people of Ohio that the wheels within 
wheels of state and county and town supervisors, on 
whom they are exhorted to spend some more thousands 
of dollars, will not be just as criminally indifferent as 
the boards, just as destructively incapable as the 
teachers? Why is it not just as feasible for the city 
wards and the rural districts to select good teachers at 
first hand, as it is to select good supervisors to select 



Purification by Supervision, 221 

the good teachers ? The Ohio commissioner avows 
that poor supervision is worse than none j that in- 
competent or inefficient supervision is an evil more 
dangerous to popular education than the combined 
antagonism of factions will or can ever be ) that the 
unscrupulous or unskilled superintendent is worse than 
an incumbrance ; he causes an immeasurable injury 
to the good teachers and to popular education which 
he threatens to destroy. To all this I most cordially 
agree, but how can more supervision be the remedy ? 
The Legislature,' he says, should provide competent 
supervision ; but are not the "narrow-minded, unscrup- 
ulous, scheming, corruptly ambitious, caucusing school- 
men " going to lobby the Legislature to secure vicious 
and partisan supervision just as vigorously as they now 
cajole or caucus bad teachers into place ? But " the 
public should see to it that this supervision is com- 
petent." So the public should see to it that the 
teaching is good. Yet in the very next paragraph 
the commissioner says that "whatever imperfections, 
carelessness, incompetence, extravagance, evils of any 
character, are connected with school management, are 
largely, if not entirely, due to culpable if not criminal 
apathy on the part of the public ; the public is respon- 
sible forthe election of every incompetent or unfit school 
officer ; for the employment of incompetent and incapa- 
ble teachers." Why should we suppose that the public, 
19 



222 Purification by Supervision. 

which is so criminally apathetic in choosing teachers 
and Boards, will turn about and be wise and alert when 
the officers whom it is to choose are called supervisors ? 
If there is one motive which may be counted on as uni- 
versal, it is love of offspring. If there is one point be- 
yond others in whi'ch men's interest may always be taken 
for granted it is the welfare of their own children. If 
then they are not careful to secure fitness in men and 
women who are to come in direct contact with these little 
ones, and shape all their future life, it is idle to suppose 
they will be exacting in the selection of persons who 
are to come into relations with them only at three or 
four removes. If they consult availability rather than 
fitness in the persons who are to be close to their chil- 
dren why should we suppose they will consult fitness 
rather than availability in those who are to stand several 
degrees remote ? 

Again, how does the fact that fifty per cent, of the 
teachers of Ohio are unfit for their work tally with the 
Centennial deductions in another part of the same 
report? 

'* The pupils' work of the Ohio educational exhibit, 
taken as a whole, was superior to the pupils' work of 
any other educational exhibit, taken as a whole. . . . 

" The excellence or superiority of the Ohio Educa- 
tional Exhibit was due, to some extent, to the fact that 
only the city and village schools were represented, and 



Purification by Supervision 223 

the superiority of these schools is largely due to the 
intelligent legislation and management given to city and 
Tillage schools and not given to ungraded schools. 
The legislator who takes pride in the public schools of 
Ohio may do so, not because of anything he has done 
as a legislator to improve the condition of these schools, 
but because of the intelligence and indefatigable energy 
of the teachers of the state. 

' * The ungraded scj^ools of Ohio had no representation 
in the Ohio educatipnal exhibit." 

Are we not confronted here with some rather start- 
ling juxtapositions ? 

If Ohio has fifty per cent, of teachers who are unfit to 
teach and yet her pupils' work at the Exhibit surpassed 
that of air others, must we not infer that Massachusetts 
and all other states except Ohio have more than fifty 
per cent, of incompetent teachers ? 

What is the proof that the ungraded schools, if they 
had been represented, would have lowered the general 
average? What is the proof that the country boy 
wrestles less vigorously with vulgar fractions than the 
city boy ; or that the country girl's composition is spelled 
worse than the city girl's of the same age 1 My own 
observation is that the mind of the city pupil is quite as 
liable to be deadened by drill as the mind of the country 
pupil is to grow torpid through inaction. 

If the excellence of the city schools is due to the 



224 Purification by Supervision. 

intelligent legislation they have had, why should the 
legislator be snubbed by the assurance that it is not 
owing to anything he has done ? Who has done the 
legislation if not the legislator? 

If this superiority is due to legislation and manage- 
ment outside, how can it be due to the intelligence and 
indefatigable energy of the teachers inside the schools ? 

If, as this school commissioner says," nowhere else in 
the public service, except alone among public school 
officers, can there be found such^a large per cent, of 
incompetence, ignorance — culpable and criminal igno- 
rance — indifference, inefficiency, and native incapacity 
to do the work engaged in, as can be found in the army 
of persons employed to teach in the public schools \ " 
and if in spite of this low estate of the teachers, the 
school exhibit of Ohio is better than that of any other 
state ; if, that is, the lowest branch of the public service 
in Ohio is higher than that in any other state, is it not 
time to surcease our inane jesting and supplant it with 
devout thanksgiving that the rank and file of this 
country is chiefly officered from Ohio ? 



THE FOOLISHNESS OF 
TEACHING. 



THE FOOLISHNESS OF TEACHING. 

THE tendency to elaboration and away from sim- 
plicity has not confined itself to the " system" 
outside the school-house but has penetrated the walls. 
Idle hands have multiplied tasks for busy hands. We 
have drawing and music in the schools ; we are intro- 
ducing sewing; we are talking about science and trades 
and languages. 

It is absurd, say the school-managers, to teach a child 
the names of all the branches of the Amazon, and leave 
him in ignorance of the principle by which water rises 
in a pump. The theory of aiming at mental 'discipline 
primarily is to be discarded, and we are to aim, instead, 
at imparting the greatest amount of the most useful 
information. Half the time we devote to reading would 
give the pupil a knowledge of the French language. 
Spelling should bow to weightier matters on the prin- 
ciple that actuated President Felton to apologize for his 
numerous orthographical blunders, by saying, " Spelling 
isn't my business. Take up Greek, and I am ready for 

(227) 



228 The Foolishness of Teaching. 

you." Spelling consists merely of verbal signs ; and to re- 
quire accuracy in retaining them consumes an immense 
proportion of time, and works great mental mischief. 
The mind should not be dwarfed to gain 'even tolerable 
spelling, but should be taught incidentally. Thus 
shine the new lights. 

No doubt many pupils would much prefer to take 
their spelling "incidentally," rather than bear any. 
longer the yoke of " accuracy ; " but I cannot help 
thinking that when a boy sits down to a collection of 
words, and puts his mind on them, and abstracts it 
from everything else until he has possessed himself of 
their spelling, he has acquired a mental vigor which no 
" incidental " learning could give him. These things 
are, indeed, sometimes carried to excess ; and I have 
myself waxed wroth over the utterly unreasonable and 
ignorant length of a spelling-lesson given to a girl eight 
years old. But because too much weakens, it does 
not follow that just enough cannot strengthen. If a 
man is a famous Greek scholar, and president of Har- 
vard University, he can afford not to know how to spell ; 
but if the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker 
do not spell their accounts and their love-letters 
correctly, it will infallibly be laid to ignorance, madam, 
sheer ignorance ; and they will not stand so high in the 
community as if they had displa3^ed more accuracy in 
retaining verbal signs. I cannot think our small men- 



The PoGllshtiess of Teachuig. 229 

tal stature is fairly attributable to our early bouts wth 

Amity, 
Jollity, 
Nullity, 
Polity, 

The dwarfing began farther back than that. No doubt 
there is a point where geography ceases to be a virtue 
in a public school ; but why should it be pieced out 
with a pump ? I do not see that it is any more neces- 
sary to a man's happiness to know why water rises in a 
pump than why it rises in the Amazon R'iver. I am 
surrounded by persons who know why the water rises 
in a pump ; but not one of them can tell me why it will 
not rise in my cistern. A thousand men may have 
Torricelli and Galileo at their tongues' ends; but, if 
the cook tells them that thS pump sucks, nine hundred- 
and ninety-nine of them will send off to the plumber as 
promptly as if they believed only that Nature abhors a 
vacuum. The dullest clod can draw water just as 
deftly as the philosopher. The knowledge of atmos- 
pheric pressure is, therefore, no more ^'useful" than 
the knowledge of geography. "Facts" are on very 
nearly the same level in point of "usefulness;" at 
least, such facts as are brought, or are proposed to be 
brought, within school-boy range ; but surely that educa- 
tion which is systematic, logical, comprehensive, is better 
than that which cleals with isolated and disconnected 



230 The FoolisJmess of Teaching, 

facts. It is better to give a boy an accurate, if gen- 
eral, idea of the formation and outline of the world he 
lives in than to select one particular pebble in it, and 
descant on that. To discard the theory of aiming 
primarily at mental discipline^ and to adopt in its stead 
the theory of imparting the greatest amount of the most- 
useful information, seem to me the fiat of ignorance, 
not of culture. Our business is not chiefly to impart 
information, but to teach children how to value, gain, 
and use information for themselves. The information 
that can be imparted to the juvenile mind during its 
scholastic term is but narrow and scanty ; but that 
mind may be so trained, that, all its life long, it can 
gain lore with ease and rapidity. We do not make 
good huntsmen by providing men with game at the 
outset, but by showing them how to handle and hold 
and sharpen their weapons. If, in practising, one can 
also bring down game, it is well ; but in all the prepar- 
atory course, the main object is practice, not prey. 

The proposed introduction, into our common schools, 
of " elementary geometry, natural philosophy, drawing, 
and the elements of chemistry," cannot be contemplated 
without misgiving ; and the suggested introduction of 
the French language sends a chill through the natural 
heart. Considering that a large number of our school- 
children come from and go to unlettered homes, and 
that they leave school at the age of fourteen, it must be 



TJie Foolishness of leaching. 231 

confessed that the time is short. What unearthly effects 
may we not expect, when upon the wild olive-tree of 
their native tongue shall be grafted the still wilder shoots 
of the foreign speech ! Doubtless some of our present 
intricacies could be cut away with advantage. A part 
of "the miserable three R's" could, unquestionably, 
be profitably curtailed. Possibly room could be made 
for the natural sciences ; but I fear we should be found 
simply to have increased perplexity, and to have ex- 
tended superficiality. 

Nor should we carry mental discipline too far, even 
in the common branches. I have occasion to consult 
a grammar ; and I open, by chance, upon a page in the 
first quarter of the book, and see 

♦' COMPOUND WORDS." 
" I. Words are cojnpounded vfhen they unite in meaning as 
one descriptive term, and, also, when they make a new or 
permanent name that varies in meaning from the separated 
words : 

*' Long-eared, red-hot (etc.) 
'* 2. Compound words are /iyp/ie?ied when first formed or 
but little used, and, also, when the parts do not poalesce as- 
smoothly as syllables of one word, or might be misunder- 
stood : 

" Rosy-fingered, ant-hill (etc.) 
'• 3. Compound words are consolidated as they come into 
general or familiar use, provided the parts coalesce like the 
eyllables of one word, and under one chief accent : 



233 The Foolishness of Teaching, 

"Statesman, salesman (etc.). 
** Errors in regard to compound words are so common, and 
dictionaries are so unreliable, that we subjoin a more minute 
analysis, which maj be carefully examined now, and referred 
to afterwards when needed." 

Then follows nearly a page and a half of very fine 
print regarding these compound words. 

I glance at the beginning to see if I have not mis- 
taken the book. No. The author in his Preface "hopes 
he has produced more nearly just such a manual as the 
great majority of public schools throughout our country 
now require. . . . This book has been written with 
particular reference to the schoolroom." 

It is, then, a school book intended for use, and is 
used, in common schools. But I object to such instruc- 
tion as this, that it serves to darken counsel by words 
without knowledge. I suppose children in grammar 
schools are from ten to fourteen years old. I suppose 
we all agree that the aim of the schools is not to make 
scholars or mere grammarians, but intelligent and 
valuable citizens of a republic. It is desirable, that as 
carpenters, farmers, cooks, seamstresses, they be able 
to keep their own accounts, to talk accurately, to read 
understanding^, to vote intelligently, to pass just judg- 
ment upon affairs, to see that the republic receive no 
detriment. 

We are not to pursue language into its delicate shad- 



The Poolishness of Teaching. 233 

ings, figures into the higher mathematics, geography 
into its remotest ramifications. What we want is sim- 
ply broad Hnes of demarcation. What we want is 
merely foundation-work. What we want is the geography 
and grammar and arithmetic of ordinary life, the great 
general principles which shall make men and women 
intelligent ; which shall give them an understanding of 
their own country, and their own language, and their 
own business ; v/hich shall make them speak and act 
with tolerable correctness ; which shall be a good basis 
for the higher education, if they choose to go on to the 
higher education; but which shall not intrench, or even 
fancy itself to intrench, upon the higher education. 

With this idea in view, it seems to me that the page 
of grammar which I have quoted is absolutely worthless. 
For all the ordinary purposes of common schools, long^ 
eared and red-hot are sufficiently explained in the ordi- 
nary adjective, and do not need a word of additional 
discussion. Moreover, what is said about them is a 
great deal harder to understand than the words them- 
selves. An ordinary child, after he has learned his les- 
son in adjectives, could master red-hot at first hand ; 
but nine out of ten of my readers would have to read 
those rules more than once, and with considerable care, 
in order to take in their bearings. Why should you 
bother a child who has only a few years to study, who, 
at fourteen or sixteen, must leave school, and earn his 
20 



234 ^^^^ Foolishness of TcacJihzg. 

own living, — why should you bother him with long words 
and uninteresting statements that are not of the slightest 
use to him, when there are so many things that he ought 
to learn and the learning of which will give him the 
same mental discipline? The author gives his "more 
minute analysis," because errors in compound words 
are so common, and dictionaries are so unreliable. I 
do not think that such errors are very common ; they 
are not very gross ; they are easily corrected by the eye 
and almost impossible of correction by rules ; but, com- 
mon or uncommon, is it worth while to try to educate 
the masses of children under fourteen years of age to a 
point beyond the dictionary ? If they are trained up to 
the dictionary, can we not afford to leave the rest to 
private taste and not to public taxation ? • 

Again : I find pronouns divided into personal, relative, 
interrogative, and adjective, and subdivided into com- 
pound personal, double possessive personal, compound 
relative, double relative, responsive relative, indefinite 
(with a slant at indirect interrogatives), distributive, 
definite, indefinite, and reciprocal. I find sentences 
kaleidoscoped into elements simple, compound, modi- 
fied, unmodified, independent, principal, subordinate, 
connective, coordinate with another, correlative with 
another, and into a nature simple, composite, declar- 
ative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory, affirmative, 
negative. 



The Foolishness of Teaching, 235 

I turn to the early, say the eighteenth page of a 
children's grammar, and I read : — 

'•Any change which varies the application or meaning of 
the predicate, whether produced by altering either of the 
words (copula or attribute) which represent it, or hy adding 
©ther words to it, is called a modification of the predicate. 

*•(«) As it is the chief object of the subject to represent some 
person or thing as the basis of an affirmation, so it is the 
principal office of the predicate to denote what is affirmed. 
But, like the subject, it can be made, by certain changes, to 
represent other properties not essential to it as predicate. 

*. 

"When the modification takes place by uniting two verbal 
forms, or by altering the form either of the copula or attri- 
bute, it is called an accident or an accidental property of the 
predicate; and the variation is called an injiection. 

"Mode relates to the manner of the assertion, not to that of 
the thing asserted, and therefore afreets the copula rather than 
the attribute. Hence, when a verb contains the copula and 
attribute united, mode should be regarded as affecting the 
assertioti^ and not the action.''^ 

When we come to analyze such a sentence as " the 
boy beat his dog," v/e learn that the predicate is lim- 
ited by a complex objective element of the first class. 
We learn, too, that the essential point of dissimilarity 
in the parts of any complex element is that one simple 
element stands 2^^ principle, or basis ^ and that all others 
are subordinate to it. 



236 The Foolishness of Teaching. 

Honest reader, do you think this is interesting read- 
ing? Yet this is what your children are required not 
only to read, but to learn. I confess that to me it 
seems utterly dreary, weary, and forlorn, a desert 
of dry bones. And if you and I, delighting in 
language, studying its histoty, its niceties, its possi- 
bilities, with delight, could not be induced by love 
or money to master all these intricacies, why should 
we enforce them upon little children ? They are of no 
use. Not only will the carpenter and the farmer never 
concern himself with them ; but even the clergyman, 
the lecturer, the writer, will give them the go-by the 
moment he leaves the school-room. When the boy has 
left school, he will never hear of a complex objective 
element, or a responsive pronoun, to the day of his 
death. Nor are these intricate elaborations and sub- 
divisions apparently conducive to clearness of thought. 
On the very first page of one of these analytical gram- 
mars, I find : — 

''4. Definition. — A sentence is a set of words making a 
complete statement. 

"5. All our talk consists of sentences. When we say any- 
thing, we make a sentence. Vv''e cannot say anything without 
making a sentence." 

Can we not, indeed ? Did no person ever say, " Oh ! 
ah! What a fine morning! Cold weather to-day! 



The Foolishness of Teaching. 237 

What an able sermon ! What wretched confusion of 
thought"! " 

We waste time and money and mind in these fine- 
spun distinctions. The general rules of grammar, 
the general structure of sentences, the ordinary, old- 
fashioned parsing, is enough for the object for which 
common schools are established. This highly techni- 
cal and artificial analysis is simply running grammar 
into the ground. It is foreign to the true lover of lan- 
guage. It throws no more light on its real meaning 
and gives no more mastery of its uses, than the simple 
analysis of the old time. It distracts the attention of 
children from the real source and beauty and use of 
words. It fritters away time that ought to be devoted 
to more important matters. It imposes upon ignorant 
and immature minds the abstractions that belong, if 
anywhere, only to maturity and scholarship. The old- 
fashioned Smith's Grammar that opened fire with, — 

Q^ ''What is jour name? 

Q. ''What is the name of the town in which jou live? 

Q^ ''What does the word noun mean? 

Ans. The word noun means name, 

Qj. "What, then, may your name be called? 

Ans. "A noun." 

was just as good for all the purposes for which gram- 
mar is taught in the public schools as any grammar 
that has superseded it. A very large part of the work 



238 The Foolishness of Teaching". 

and money spent in changing school books is spent in 
the interest of the writers and publishers of school 
books, and not in the interests of the pupils or of their 
parents. Often the interests of pupil and parent 
are sacrificed to the interests of writer and publisher. 
An ordinary book depends for its sale upon its own 
merits, or upon influences that may be brought to 
bear upon individuals. A school book is not presented 
to a tenth part of the persons who are to be its pur- 
chasers, but to a small number of committee-men. If, 
by any means, they can be induced to adopt it, whole 
schools purchase it, — are, in a manner, forced to pur- 
chase it ; and it has thus a market beyond that of the 
most sensational novel. The parents grumble, and — 
buy. A very small sum goes out of the pocket of each 
purchaser. A very large sum goes into the pocket of 
the proprietor. Meanwhile, the children have a book 
that may be better than its predecessors, but is just as 
likely to be worse. 

I have known men, principals of schools, to narrate 
the infinite pains taken to procure a " model sheet " of 
punctuation, which is supposed to serve as guide. After 
the professional scholastics had exhausted their knowl- 
edge and ingenuity on it, the sheet was taken to the 
leading proof-readers in simdry renowned printing- 
houses, and then regarded as conclusive ; and any vari- 



The Poolishiiess of Teaching. 239 

ation from their decision would be a presumptuous dis- 
agreement with the highest earthly authority. 

This is not only trivial but illiterate. Mathematics 
is an exact science. Punctuation is not an exact sci- 
ence. All the proof-readers in the world cannot dic- 
tate a decision between semicolon and period, between 
parentheses and dashes, between commas and non- 
commas ! The only use of punctuation is to point the 
sense. To uplift it into a momentous and difficult 
problem, to whose solution the intellect of universities , 
must be summoned, is simply and gravely ridiculous. 
Any teacher who does not know enough of grammar 
and rhetoric, who has not education enough, to decide 
on general principles every case of punctuation that 
can come before her without reference to any authority 
whatever, does not know enough to be a teacher. Any 
teacher who fancies punctuation to be a matter so doubt- 
ful, so difficult, so important as to justify consultation 
and reflection ; who fancies it to be a matter so scien- 
tific as to permit demonstration, so rigid as to have only 
one right and all else wrong, — any teacher, in short, who 
does not punctuate by instinct, is too illiterate to be a 
teacher. For any group of men to prescribe a " model 
sheet" as guide to teachers is to frame illiteracy into a 
law ; is to weigh down the -brows of teachers with the 
iron crown of ignorance. 

It is never to be forgotten that a city school of six 



240 The Poolishfiess of Teaching. 

or eight or ten hundred children cannot be so easily 
and simply conducted as a country school of forty or 
fifty pupils. On the other hand, it is equally impor- 
tant to remember that the multiplication of machinery 
is not in itself a mark of excellence ; that the greatest 
attainable simplicity is just as desirable in a large 
school as in a small. Machinery is only means to an 
end. Everything which tends to exalt the machinery 
above the work which it produces is wrong ; and all 
such machinery is not only useless to the pupils, but is 
a needless expense to the community which sustains 
the schools. 

A great deal of time is wasted in school by making 
children go through certain cumbrous, useless, and 
tiresome formulas of recitation and explanation. In- 
stead of being encouraged to march quick and straight 
to the heart of the question, and so attain mental ce- 
lerity, they are made to climb painfully and formally 
over all the successive points. If the question is " 7 
times 5 is how many times 7 ?" they are not allowed 
to answer "5," but are made to say, " 7 times ^ is 5 
times 7." But the gist of the matter is all in giving 
the answer 5. The rest is clumsiness, repetition. The de- 
fence is that thus the child is taught accurac}^ thorough- 
ness, language. Not at all. He is taught to be a bore. 
That style of conversation in ordinary society would 
make a man intolerable. The child's arithmetic is 



The Foolishness of Teachiitg. 241 

just as thorough when he gets the answer correctly as 
when he restates the question. He is hampered in 
his mental agility to no purpose whatever. I would 
let a child jump at his mathematical conclusion with 
just as much rapidity as he can command, and let him 
jump his own way. There is no need that every boy 
in a class should go through the same process in sub- 
traction j one way is as good as another provided the 
answer is right. Nor is.it necessary to burden children 
with learning the rules. The rules are only to en- 
able pupils to do the examples. And we should 
be very tender about enforcing explanation from a 
child. It is idle to say that he must thoroughly under- 
stand one thing before he goes on to anotheTr. It is- 
hardly too much to say that in this world we do not 
thoroughly understand anything. Why demand of a child 
more than we exact from ourselves? A large part of 
our mental furnishing is ready-made. Our stock in 
trade is chiefly second-hand. Not one person in a 
hundred, in a thousand, understands simple, multiplica- 
tion. We can go through the process with great facility ; 
but we never should have invented it ourselves. The 
explanation of it is abstruse philosophy — the memo- 
rizing and understanding of the rule require a stretch 
of attention and a comprehension and command of 
language which we ought not to impose upon the tender 
strength of the little children. Their memory an(^ 



342 "^he Foolishness of Teaching. 

their perception and tlieir language will have ample 
scope in learning the things they must know. Their 
little feet should not be v/earied with scrambling along 
rough ways that lead nowhere. 
- There are indeed a thousand pleasant and useful ways 
that must be passed by. Shall a child not go on until 
he understands the present thoroughly ? What is the 
capital of Massachusetts ? Boston. What is a capital ? 
The boy is very ill-taught who does not know that it is 
the place where the legislature meets and that the leg- 
islature is the assembly that makes laws. But know- 
ins: this does he therefore understand the matter thor- 
oughly ? On the contrary he is only one step beyond 
i)Ot undcFstanding it at all. The nature of the law, the- 
story of despotism, the rise of popular government, in- 
deed the w^hole history of the world revolve in ever 
widening circles around the simple fact that Boston is 
the capital of Massachusetts. No book, no supervisor, 
no " system," no theory can decide how much of this it 
is v/orth while to impart to the school-boy. Only a 
cultivated teacher who is familiar with it herself and 
knows also the capacity of her pupils can judge. When 
she has given them all they can digest, and perhaps a 
good deal which is not to be instantly assimilated .but 
rather to be held in reserve till their minds shall have 
grown up to if and Jiave a use for it, she knows — 
none better— -that_ she has not given them anything 



The Poolishness of Teaching. 243 

worthy to be called a thorough understanding of it, but 
only a few connected facts, a slight intelligent outline 
to help them classify their future facts and judge 
more correctly of events. The really good teacher 
knows that a pupil can be thorough in nothing except in 
performing the simple and definite task set before him. 
She can be sure that he has thoroughly learned his 
lesson. She cannot be sure that he thoroughly under- 
stands it. 
s While information is not the main object of schools, 
it should not be forgotten that information is a very im- 
portant matter. Information is food for the child's 
mind. He is not to be gorged and glutted with it ; but 
he is to be nourished and strengthened with it. It is 
wasteful and wicked to train his memory, his accuracy, 
his language with the learning, the classifying, the sta- 
ting of dry, useless, metaphysical abstractions when all 
his faculties can be just as well trained with useful, 
interesting, and suggestive facts. 

On the other hand, the same system which binds as 
with cords these opening minds is as lax in one direc- 
tion as it is tense in another. In the multiplication of 
offices we are trying to invent a medical supervisor ; and 
in his frantic endeavor to create something to do, this 
aimless and anxious but amiable gentleman has an- 
nounced the extraordinary theory that the child of the 
period is too fragile to be sent to school promptly and 



244 "^^^ PoolisJmess of Teaching, 

to learn his lessons thoroughly and hence these " petty 
restrictions " should be pretermitted. " He is, perhaps, 
marked for tardiness, and hence eats his meals in a 
state of trepidation lest he come late to school ; he is 
marked for each recitation ; he is constantly inquiring 
how he stands." 

With unerring precision our medical inspector has 
alighted upon the two " petty restrictions " which are 
perhaps as important as any that his whole education 
can teach a child — promptness at school and perfection/ 
in recitation. Promptness is one-half the battle, aspi- 
ration for perfection is the other half. A mother who 
cannot manage her child!s breakfast so that he can eat 
it comfortably in season for school is a very poor 
mother, and the medical inspector can help her out 
better by going into her kitchen and building the fire 
himself than by going into the school-room and telling 
her boy he need not be there in season ; while any 
boy whose brain cannot bear the wear and tear of being 
marked each day according to his recitation might as 
well be sent to South Boston at once. Healthy children 
ought not to be kept back to the slow steps of such 
weaklings. 

I have referred before to the proposed abolition of 
text-books in schools — an abolition which seems to 
me admirably adapted to increase the weakness and 
cripple the strength of children. *' Lecturer Allen of 



The Foolishness of Teaching. 245 

Harvard " is reported to teach " that it would be an im- 
mense gain if text-books in common schools were entirely 
abolished — v/ith the exception of some ver}^ brief man- 
ual of dates and results as a guide to memory ! History, 
physics and astronomy, for example, should be taught 
orally." Mr. Allen's reason is the rather remarkable 
one that the growing number and cost of text-books, 
and the crowding of school-work, will force this method 
as the only escape from a break-down of the entire 
system! It is true that school-work is crowded. It is 
true that text-books have become ^ burden . But because 
a man is given to appetite, must he be fed with a spoon 
by a nurse? Take off the useless machine-work from 
the school, stem the tide of new coming text-books ; 
but do not tie the children up to a teacher's lips. It is 
a part of the school's business to teach the pupils to go 
alone. A teacher may teach a boy a lesson in history 
better than the boy can learn it from a book ; but more 
important than the historical knowledge to be derived 
from either book or teacher, is the power to acquire a 
lesson himself. Every boy must live his own life alone. 
He needs to be endowed with personal, individual 
strength. He should be taught not to lean against 
some one else, but to stand erect on his own feet. Oral 
teaching is a specious, a showy, a dangerous thing. It 
may produce great apparent immediate results in knowl- 
edge; but it has a weakening effect upon the pupil's self- 



246 The FoolisJiness of Teaching. 

reliance and mental fibre. A boy ought not to depend 
on his teacher to teach him, but on his own self to learn. 
As soon as he leaves school, he must depend upon him- 
self. He will not be able to carry his teacher around 
with him. It is much better that in school, under a 
wise tutelage, he should form the habit of self-direction. 
The good teacher will'always combine with text-books, 
oral teaching enough. This, like all else, depends upon 
and should be left to the teacher. To make a rule 
about it is to have recourse to machinery and think 
that will answer instead of mind. To take away text- 
books and make the pupil depend solely upon the 
teacher is to put the main work upon the teacher and 
leave the boy to an enervating dependence, an un- 
manly dilettanteism. The only sensible thing to do is 
to secure teachers educated and wise, and leave them 
to use text-books and oral teaching in whatever propor- 
tion they think proper and find useful. 

" A State superintendent, who had made during a 
long term of office hundreds of visits to ungraded 
country schools, declared that he never once saw a 
teacher conducting a recitation without a text-book in , 
hand ; that he seldom saw either teacher or pupil at 
the blackboard ; that he never saw a school-globe 
actually in use ; that he never saw a teacher give an 
object lesson; that he never heard a lesson on morals 
or manners ; that he never saw but one school-cabinet ; 



The Foolishness of Teaching. 247 

that he never saw a reading class trained to stand erect 
and hold a book properly ; that he never heard a 
teacher give a lesson in local geography ; that classes, 
when asked to point north, uniformly pointed upwards 
to the zenith ; that he never heard a spelling dictated " 
in which the teacher did not mispronounce on^ormore 
words ; and that he never found a school where the 
pupils had been trained to write a letter, either of busi- 
ness or friendship." 

And what of it all ? A teacher can conduct a recitation 
just as well with a text-book in hand as without it. A 
fool does not become a sage because he sucks his 
thumbs instead of thumbing his books. Some of the 
very best teachers this country ever saw taught with 
text-book in hand. This superintendent has taken 
into his head as an eternal and immutable principle that 
teaching should be done without text-books and so 
goes through the schoobhouses measuring everything 
by his own standard as if it were the invariable unit. 
And indeed for the whole of his negatives, one may 
say that if our schools are to be judged by what the 
superintendents do not see and do, we enter instantly 
upon the region of infinite mathematics. I could 
match every one of his negatives with a positive. I can 
show him schools superintended by superintendents 
and supervised by supervisors, graded and grounded 
on all modern improvements and full-fed with the 



248 The Foolislutess of TeacJmig. 

latest and most improved methods of teaching — whose 
male principals issue orders to their assistants that 

"Teachers will not allow their pupils to roll their 
whoops in the yard." 

All the machinery of the most perfectly organized 
" system " in this Republic has not been able to per- 
suade its highly organized principal that his sub- 
teachers, during small-pox season, could not find " a list 
of the infected houses in the Boston Herald." Did 
our peripatetic superintendent *ever find an ungraded 
schoolmaster announce or denounce the stair-mount- 
ing as " a Herculanean task ? " Would it not be better 
for even a graded city schoolmaster to let the superin- 
tendent see him conduct a recitation with spelling-book 
in hand, rather than head his list of words for the 
examination of pupils with a self-evolved "affraid?" 
I think it no worse for the country teacher not to use 
a blackboard at all than it is for the city teacher to 
adorn it with infinite flourishes in green crayon of "No 
Wispering in School." Had my superintendent visited 
his city grade.s with the same assiduity which he be- 
stowed on the country schools he might have studied 
for a day the interesting though hitherto insoluble 
problem, placed upon the blackboard by the male 
principal, " What is a trancetive verb ? " And all the 
morals and manners of the most highly organized 
'' system" and all the grading of the schools could not 



The Poolishness of Teaching. 249 

keep the principal from sitting in the presence of female 
pupils and female assistants with his feet scarcely below 
the level of his head. 

I never saw nor heard a pupil point to the zenith 
when asked to point north, and if pupils do it "uniformly" 
under the questioning of a school superintendent, it is 
doubtless a case of unconscious cerebration showing the 
rather startling influence of Mr, Kiddle's remarkable 
researches in the upper world. So far however from 
dismissing superintendent Kiddle on account of his 
spiritual meanderings, not to say maunderings, I would 
gladly grant leave to be to all the superintendents if 
they would strictly observe a contract to confine their 
attentions to the unseen v^orld and leave solely to the 
teachers the management of the schools in this ! 
! If my superintendent's negatives are all true it Only 
shows the deadening effects of our school "system." 
Twenty, thirt}^, fifty years ago, before we were weighed 
down with centralization and Boards and machinery, 
I do not believe the most remote country school could 
be found which did not use a blackboard every day if it 
had one, and did not teach its pupils both manners and 
morals and north and south. 

The odium which supervisory conceit attempts to 
cast upon ungraded schools, upon unsupervised schools, 
upon un" system "ized schools, is entirely gratuitous. 
I am not unfamiliar" with that kind of schpol. I re- 

21* 



250 The PooUsJniess of Tcachhig. 

member it with affection and delight. We used to 
make *' cuddy-houses " of our seats in winter with cloaks 
and shawls. We used to slide down the slanting aisles, 
made slippery with tin dipperfuls of water in summer, 
in a manner quite shocking to the soul of a systematic 
superintendent. The only "examination " of teachers 
was in the minister's study and he was so kind-hearted 
that he v/ould not have rejected a fly ; but our teachers, 
chosen without method and examined without pretence, 
have gone out into all the earth and their words unto 
the ends of the world. One young professional student 
I remember earned our undying gratitude by recording 
only two tardinesses for the term — explaining that 
only two had failed to be in before recess. It does not 
sound well in a system but we were not idiots and we 
appreciated the joke. I do not remember any special 
lecture on morals or manners, but his own gentleness 
and the mild and delicate patience with which he used 
to encourage the almost inaudible recitation of one 
bashful girl were a daily and hourly lesson in courtesy. 
The best and most effective lesson on both morals and 
manners was administered unconsciously and instinc- 
tively by a young country girl who was teacher in the 
same ungraded school. A big, rude, uncouth boy, 
moved, 1 believe, by some boyish " dare,", stepped up 
softly behind her one " noon-time" as she sat bending 
over her table, and left a kiss on* her white shoulder. 



The Foolishness of Teaching. 251 

With awe I saw then, with pride I now remember, how 
the slow scarlet blood crept into her cheek ; but no other 
movement betrayed her shock, and the whole room's 
silent shame was the boy's best discomfiture. Of all our 
hap-hazard teachers, I remember best one good-for- 
nothing, and I am pleased to reflect and not ashamed 
to confess that we made his life a burden to him by our 
pranks, and waited for no Board of examiners to pro- 
nounce him incompetent. I am surprised as I recall 
one after another our random teachers, and remember 
how many of the women were not only conscientious 
but gentle, lady-like, helpful, successful teachers ; how 
many of the men, who must have been mere youthful , 
students, were quiet, gentleman-like, faithful and real 
teachers. 



CORPORAL PUNISHMENT. 



CORPORAL PUNISHMENT. 

WITHIN a few years some of our communities 
have forbidden all resort to corporal punish- 
ment for refractory pupils. They have denounced it 
as barbarous and degrading. An indiscreet adminis- 
tration of it aroused an excitement as indiscreet as the 
original sin. Instead of removing the one offender, 
we remove from all hands the weapon with which he 
has offended : it is always so much easier to generalize 
than to discriminate. 

Nevertheless I relapse into barbarism sufficiently to 
suggest whether in the present state of our civiliza- 
tion and our school-organization, corporal punishment 
be not a means of grace which we cannot abolish, and 
have not abolished, without injury. The necessity of 
using it is very, perhaps increasingly, rare. The teach- 
er who frequently and freely resorts to it is presumptively 
unfit for his situation. The remedy is not to exclude 
the rod but to exclude that teacher. But the power to 
use personal chastisement should vest in the teacher, 



256 Corporal Punishment, 

and is a preventive of mischief. Corporal punishment 
has never been abolished in the kingdoms of nature or of 
grace. Few well-trained or even ill-trained families exist, 
in which, at some time or other, in greater or less de-** 
gree, some resort to it has not been found necessary, or 
made expedient. Many a mother testifies that while five 
of her children can be governed by a look or an appeal 
to their reason or their love, the sixth is amenable only 
to the argument of a little whisk. Every teacher knows 
that there are boys v^ho, by some inward conformation, 
or some defect of home-training, do not respond to the 
ordinary motives of tRe schoolroom. Our delicacy 
which thinks it unmanly and barbarous to flog these 
boys has no last resort but to send them home. But 
what is this ? We are depriving them of school privi- 
leges. We are wresting from them the opportunities 
for education. We are sending them back to parents 
who have already shown themselves incapable of train- 
ing their children. Instead of supplementing the defects 
of home we intensify them. We give the little victims 
over, unhelped and hardened, to the cruel indulgence, 
to the fatal unwisdom of their untaught, incapable guar, 
dians. To turn many of the boys out of school is to 
turn them upon the street, is to let them loose into a 
life of idleness and lawlessness. It is unjust to the 
parents as well as ruinous to the child. 

The former have paid their share,of the taxes which 



Corporal Punishment. 257 

support the school, and they have a right to all the 
benefit which the school is capable of bestowing. 
When they send their children to school, the school 
ought to teach and govern them, not send them home 
again. This is just what the naughty boys want. In 
very many cases the rod would not need to be used. 
If the boy knows that by playing tricks, or by pro- 
longed idleness, or contumacy, or rebellion, he will 
only be sent adrift, he will play the tricks and wrench 
himself free from restraint. If he know, on the con- 
trary that the result of his tricks and his manners will 
be personal chastisement, public di?K:omfiture, and 
social disgrace, with his tasks to be performed just the 
same at the end of it all, he will be very likely to give 
over his contention before it be meddled with. The 
mere knowledge that a rod impends is the turning- 
point between vice and virtue. The boy may not be 
inherently vicious but "roguish." Half his trouble 
is the turbulence of his animal spirits, the overflow of 
his vitality, hitherto unrestrained, lawless, and, if left 
lawless, certain to work mischief. The school supplies 
just that element of austerity, perhaps of justice, 
which the home-training lacked, and which the boy's 
character needed. I have heard teachers, who them- 
selves never inflicted corporal punishment, aflfirm that 
the evil effects of its abolition were clearly percepti- 
ble. Its use is as salutary as its abuse is brutal. Its 



358 Corporal Punishment. 

abolition in school is as unwise as would be its aboli- 
tion in the family ; while its abuse in school has been 
far less common than its abuse in the family, since the 
superior cultivation and control of the teacher more 
than offset the superior affection of the untrained 
parenj, and is therefore a safer guaranty against pas- 
sion and consequent excess and injustice. The sweep- 
ing away of corporal punishment from schools is the 
flowering of that tare of weakness which springs to 
vigorous growth side by side with the wheat of kind-, 
ness in our rich American soil. It is the same vague, 
blind, emasculate, injudicious complaisance which winks 
at crime, and shrinks from punishment, and pardons 
out ; and is not so far removed from cruelty to the 
community as it is from beneficence to the criminal. 
And always and everywhere it is, to the full measure 
of its influence, subversive of manhood, and fatal to 
character. 

If the good God should ever change his mind so far 
as to give children only into the hands of those who 
will bring them up to all good principles and practices, 
in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, it might well 
be that the severer forms of penalty would naturally 
fade out, and disappear from the schools. But at pres- 
ent nothing seems to be farther from his thought ; and . 
. we must plan accordingly. 

Not long ago a young woman in a public school of 



Corporal Punishment. 259 

Iowa was whipped by a male teacher. She was twenty- 
one years old. Not being in firm health her father wrote 
a request that the teacher excuse her from algebra. 
He refused, and as her recitation was not satisfactory he 
called her to account for it. She pleaded the excuse 
she had brought from her father. He replied, " None 
of your sass, or I will take the hickory to you," and 
thereupon raised his weapon, described as about four 
feet long and half an inch in diameter at the larger end, 
and gave her a dozen blows whose marks lasted two 
months. 

This story does not sound true, but the newspapers 
report the case and report it as having been twice tried 
and decided in the supreme court of Iowa. Assuming 
it to be true, would Iowa remedy the evil by passing a . 
law forbidding corporal punishment in schools ? Not in 
the least. On the contrary, so long as Iowa permits 
brutal ignorant and vulgar villains to take charge of her 
public schools, it is well to retain the pOwer of whipping 
young women, in order that the lowans may be re- 
minded from time to. time what sort of beast it is to whom 
they intrust their children. If a man have not sense 
enough to enQourage a pupil to study a part of the day 
when she has not health enough to study all day, if a 
teacher be a sufficiently untamed savage to think that 
a girl is to be taught by beatings, or that the proper 
mode of addressing a woman is " none of your sass," 



26o Corporal Punishment, 

and if the lowans have no way of finding it out except 
by occasionally offering up a young woman in sacrifice, 
it would be a pity to forbid them the possibility of their 
Iphigenia. Perhaps Iphigenia may presently object to 
it with spirit and power enough to induce the suspicion 
that the best and surest way to banish the brutality is 
to banish the brute. 

Boston presents herself in an equally unfavorable 
light when her public prints declare that " one of the 
most successful principals in the city, according to 
general estimation, has been known to direct a pri- 
mary teacher to use the rattan as a means of over- 
coming a nervous shyness on the part of a little girl 
pupil less than six years of age." 

I cannot think that this is true. I believe that 
the rules of the Boston School Board forbid corporal 
punishment for girls ; but supposing it to be true, should 
we gain much by forbiddingcorporal punishment, while 
retaining as teachers that species of animated nature 
which is only prevented by a Board rule from beating 
nervous little girls six years old ? 

I suspect the actual amount of corporal punishment 
has been very much overrated, and that. the power of 
using it has very seldom been abused. An over- 
whelming majority of teachers have never inflicted it. 
An overwhelming majority of pupils have never suf- 
fered it. Just the same is it true, unhappily, that there 



Corporal Punishment, 261 

are in the public schools pupils — generally boys of evil 
homes — to whom this often unspoken menace seems to 
be the concluding motive. Recognizing this fact, un- 
willing entirely to act without such recognition, yet true 
to its instinct of doing anything and everything but the 
one thing needful, our school '' system " makes no 
movement to secure teachers so wise as to be trust- 
worthy, but seeks to avert the evil only by binding re- 
strictions upon teachers whom it tacitly admits to 
be untrustworthy. 

'' Ordered, that the committee on rules and regu- 
lations be requested to consider the expediency of 
reporting an order providing that the use of corporal 
punishment in all forms be forbidden in the sixth classes 
of the primary schools, unless special permission be 
given in individual cases.'* 

But "individual cases" are the only ones upon 
whom corporal punishment is inflicted — without any 
committee. Or does the committee suppose that the 
primary teachers usually go up and down beating the 
little ones in regular order, or that they thrash around 
right and left promiscuously. The only thing such 
rules really do is to injure the influence and destroy 
the authority of teachers by taking — before the eyes 
of the pupil — the judgment out of the hands of the 
teacher and putting it into the hands of the committee, 
thus virtually telling the pupil that his teacher is not 



263 Co7'poral Punishment. 

to be trusted. In the next sentence this matter is 
presented formally. 

"Ordered, that a committee of special discipline be 
appointed, consisting of five members, who shall have 
authority to grant such permission whenever they deem 
it needful." 

This is but making a bad matter worse. This is not 
abolishing corporal punishment. If there is aught de- 
basing, brutalizing, unjust in corporal punishment, this 
retains it all and degrades the teacher besides. This 
is simply transferring the power from one person to an- 
other ; and transferring it from the person who knows 
all the circumstances and is responsible, to persons 
who know nothing whatever of the circumstances and* 
are largely irresponsible. 

I do not assert the infallibility of teachers. I do not 
deny that the teacher like all other men and women ^ 
will " bear watching." The community and the com- 
mittee have not only the right but the duty to hold the 
teacher to strict accountability for every official act. 
But it is a gross misunderstanding of the requisite 
qualifications of a teacher to shield children against 
his violence by abolishing corporal punishment, and it 
is a great misapprehension of the position of the teach- 
er to withdraw judgment from his hands and put it into 
the hands of an outside corporation. 

They do these things better in Ohio. In Cleveland 



Co7'Poral Punishme7it. 263 

the matter is left entirely to the discretion of teachers. 
They use corporal punishment whenever in their judg- 
ment the case requires it, subject to no outside interfer- 
ence. But they are required to report to the Board 
every case in full detail : the offence, the general charac- 
ter of the offender, the home influences surrounding 
him, the other means which have been employed for 
his reform, the notification of his behavior to his parents 
and to the principal, and the number of such previous 
notifications, and the result of the punishment. 

I do not see how it is possible to improve upon this 
method. The rod is still left for a warning to evil 
doers. The teacher is made, as he should be, sole and 
supreme judge of its necessity, but responsible for its 
use to a definite tribunal, and so minutely responsible 
that the very fact of having recourse to it gives almost 
a moral certainty of its necessity. 

We may set never so many safeguards around the 
rod; but the only one that is of real account is a 
teacher wise enough to'know when to use it, and when 
to let it alone. A teacher who is at once gentle and 
inflexible ; who has sympathy with the young mind, and 
can put himself in its place ; who demands accuracy, 
but does not overwhelm timidity ; who can discriminate 
between fun and falsehood, between weakness and 
viciousness, between incapacity and idleness ; who has 
a hundred eyes to see what ought to be seen, but can 



264 Corpo7'al Pnnish7nent. 

also, on occasion, be a little blind and a little deaf; a 
man in short who, besides learning, has imagination 
and sense, — such a one need be hampered by no limi^ 
tations in teaching or in governing ; while, to put into a 
position of the utmost delicacy and importance a hot- 
headed, uncultivated, and narrow-minded person, and 
expect to make him useful or harmless by merely dis- 
arming him, seems to be the furthest in the world from 
intelligent economy," or judicious government. 



TEACHERS' SALARIES, 



SALARY OF TEACHERS. • 

^'TT^HE largest item of expense in the conduct of 
A. schools, " says the report naively, " is the cost 
of instruction ! ! " By a process of natural logic economy 
chips away at this " largest item," and the next sen- 
tence is, "Within the past two years the salaries of 
teachers have twice been reduced, and a large reduction 
has thus been made in this item." The largest item in 
boarding a child is the cost of food ; we have therefore 
bought cheaper food and a large reduction has thus been 
made in this item. But is there not danger that this 
cheaper food has less nourishment; that the milk is 
watered, the sugar sanded, the butter rank ? 

If reduction must be made, if expenses must be 
lessened, would it not be better to take away the china 
and put earthen ware in its place, to take off the the table- 
cloth and eat from the bare boards, to send the waiter 
from behind the children's chairs and let them wait upon 
each other ; in short, is not the fresh, wholesome, tooth- 
some, and ample food of the very first importance 

(267) 



268 Salary of Teachers. 

to the child and the very last thing to be diminished 
either in quality or quantity? By no means, says the 
committee, the cost of instruction is the largest item of 
expense. But it ought to be. Schools are established for 
instruction and for nothing else. Cut off everything 
exc^t instruction, but leave that untouched. Not so. 
Having, openly confessed that it has twice within two 
years reduced the salaries of the teachers, it concludes 
that " the most important work in our schools at pres- 
ent " is a supervision of the teachers. That is, attract 
poor work by reducing the pay of the workers, be con- 
tent with poor teachers who do not understand their 
business and cannot be trusted to do their business, 
and then make up for it by spending several thousand 
dollars for a supervision of the work. 

'" If then," says another superintendent on a salary 
of about $4,000, "if then, retrenchment is to be made, 
it must be effected either by cutting down salaries or 
by increasing the number of pupils to a teacher ; or, 
what amounts to the same thing, by reducing the num- 
ber of teachers." That is, a reduction can be made 
not by lopping off supernumeraries but 'by curtailing 
essentials. The same superintendent admits in his 
report that his ownjofnce was created only after long 
and strenuous opposition. That is, a great many 
people think the office unnecessary. But probably no 
one will be found to say that forty-nine children are 



Salary of Teachers, 269 

too few to take up a primar}' teacher's time and strength. 
Indeed a superintendent not five miles away from this 
gentleman declares his belief that no teacher "has the 
vitality to give to five hours of daily work with his 
classes. Three hours of earnest, faithful class-work is 
the utmost that should be required." The superin- 
tendent himself says that except for the expense it 
would be better to change from forty-nine to forty — but 
considering the expense he recommends the change 
from forty-nine to fifty-six ; but does not hint that thirty 
or forty thousand dollars be saved by abolishing the 
doubtful offices of superintendent and supervisors until 
such time as the unanimous voice of the tax-pnyers and 
parents cry out for them. A report protests against the 
extravagance of having only one janitor for several 
buildings because of the great waste of coal and the 
injury to furnaces caused thereby. But the waste of 
vitality and mental fibre and nervous force caused by 
having too many children under one teacher cannot be 
measured by a thermometer or reckoned by the coal- 
man's bills — so we will cram and crowd the children 
together and give the teacher no time nor opportunity 
to get acquainted wqth the character, to study the na- 
ture, to guide the development of each child ; but we 
will keep the supervisors at their important work of 
recommending to the teachers to advise the pupils to 
write their names in their copy-books ! 
23 



270 Salary of Teachers. 

I have searched in vain thrcfUgh three hundred pages 
of a certain Middle State School Report to find any 
recommendatiq;! to raise the salary of a single teacher 
in the State, but I find several pages devoted to the 
necessity of raising the salary of the State Commission- 
ers of schools. It is argued that he shall be provided 
with a travelling fund large enough to enable him to 
visit each county in the State; that his work requires 
such especial fitness and ability, and such incessant,- 
hard and skilled labor that more reasonable and ade- 
quate compensation should be paid him j that the fact 
that he is out of the line of political promotion and pro- 
fessional advancement should act in the way of increase 
ing his salary to compensate for the sacrifice of his 
ambition ; that he is worth more than he receives or he 
is worth nothing ; that the State's reputation for honest 
liberality requires the payment to him of a larger salary ; 
that, in short, if the commissioner cannot have his salary 
increased and his travelling fund supplied, the State 
would better dispense with its commissioners altogether. 

I do not see the salary of the commissioners on the 
pages of the report, but I find that the average month- 
ly wages of the teachers are about forty-seven dollars. 
I hazard the conjecture that the wages of the commis^ 
sioner are more than that. For political promotion he 
is no further out of line than are all the female teachers,- 
and for professional advancement than are the large 



Salary of Teachers. 271 

majority I think I may say of all the teachers — not one 
of whom receives any compensation in consideration 
and for not one of whom does he advocate any increase 
of salary on that account. 

When we come to his " incessant, hard, and skilled 
labor," the case is even clearer. To drive around 
through all the counties of a State seeing other people 
work is not half so exhaustive of vitality as to stay all 
the year between four walls and work yourself. The 
state commissioner goes when he likes, comes when he 
likes, sees men, sees places, has a breezy, holiday sort 
of life, an undefined, elastic sort of work with no exact 
standard of accomplishment and no competent tribunal 
of judgment. If he is ill a day or two, if he is idle a 
day or two, if he is pleasuring a day or two, it is of no 
importance to any one. The real work of the schools 
is gohig on just the same, all the time, without him as 
well as with him ; because that work is done by the teach- 
ers who are always there, who have a definite task to ac- 
complish, who are always surrounded by a great cloud 
of witnesses and who cannot be absent for a day or an 
hour without being missed and without adding to some 
other person's work. 

A morning paper in San Francisco shows that the 
west has not been slow in following the east in the 
establishment of ''system ;" "20 per cent, of the public 
school money of that city," it says, "is squandered in 



372 Salary of Teachers. 

unnecessarily high salaries, in expensive ornamental 
studies, in running costly machinery and like extrava- 
gance. A primary teacher, who would earn $150 per 
month if she had pro rata tuition on her class, actually 
receives from $50 to $70. per month. The bulk of the 
work of the department is done by these teachers. 
The difference between what they would receive and 
what they do receive is devoted to paying high salaries 
for figure-heads, very many of whom are an injury to' 
the department." 

In New York the board-of education compelled the 
teachers to bear $432,000 of the whole reduction of 
$550,000, or in another light the appropriation of 1878 
was $153,000 below the appropriation for 1877, and 
they cut down the teachers' salaries to the extent of 
$152,400, thus making the teachers bear all the burden 
of retrenchment except $600. Yet the sum expended on 
books and stationery was $170,000, janitors $126,0.00, 
fuel $80,000, superintendents and clerks $76,500, inci- 
dental expenses of board $20,000, for purchasing, 
leasing and procuring sites, repairs, enlargements, 
alterations, etc., $550,000. Yet all these items are left 
untouched. No inquiry is made into commissions or 
percentages. Not a penny less can be paid to plumb- 
ers and carpenters, to janitors, superintendents, and 
publishers ; but the teachers who do all the work for 
which the sites and superintendents, the percentages 



Salary of Teachers. 273 

and the plumbers exist, are cut down summarily 
to the lowest living rate. Is a system which permits, 
which pursues such practices a thing to be overween- 
ingly proud of ? 

In Cambridge, Mass., the salaries of the female 
assistants in the grammar schools -that is, of the 
persons who do the solid work of teaching -have 
been reduced from $700- $850 to $500 -$650; of the 
teachers in the primary schools from $700 to $500- 
$600. The training school, however, is continued 
with its salaries from $575 to $900; the music teach- 
er is continued at a salary of $2000, and the superin- 
tendent at a salary of $2700. The salary of the su- 
perintendent remains higher than that of any teacher 
except the high school master. In that city the 
wages- of a good dressmaker are not considered 
unreasonable at $3.50 per day. The Press, which 
reports these proceedings, reports that Dr. Peabody of 
Harvard University, who was not in favor of reducing 
any salaries that were already as low as ^700, declared 
$7.00 per week to be the common price for teachers' 
board. But another member of the committee, whose 
own success in life has not been hampered by any over- 
anxiety on points of grammar, and who may naturally 
suppose that it is not worth while to put a great deal of 
cost into the unimportant item of instruction, cogently 
inquired '* If the teacher in i860 could live on a salary 



274 Salary of Teacher :>. 

of $350, why can she not do so now? " and the reduc- 
tion was effected. 

In Boston, in the* Report for 1876, the expenditures 
are so lumped that I cannot get at the salaries of the 
teachers or superintendents in detail. But I find that 
the whole amount of the salaries of the teachers was 
$1,235,375.24, while incidental expenses including the 
salaries of the outside officials were $502,259.03, nearly 
half the cost of the teaching. The whole amount ex- 
pended during the year for new school-houses, and 
land for the same, was $277,746.57, - " a sum consider- 
ably below the average of the expenditure for these 

purposes for the last ten years The average 

cost per sitting was $152.36." The cost per scholar in 
the day school for tuition was $25.94 ; for incidentals 
$10.21. I view statistics with great suspicion : if I read 
these statistics aright the incidentals of instruction in 
Boston cost about two-fifths as much as the instruction 
itself, while it costs about six times as much to get a 
boy seated where he can be taught as it does to teach 
him ! 

In a little country village a few miles from Boston, 
which has neither supervisor nor superintendent, the 
amount paid the teachers for the last financial year 
was $1,075.50. The incidental expenses including 
the salaries of officials outside were $150.37. The 
whole amount expended on school-houses was $41.87. 



Salury of Teachers. 275 

Boston spent on incidentals nearly half what she spent 
on teaching. This little hamlet spent on incidentals 
not quite one-seventh. Boston spent on school-houses 
for the last ten years nearly one-fifth what she pays for 
instruction. My hamlet»has spent about one twenty- 
sixth. The boys and gifls in the hamlet school-houses 
are just as comfortable as the boys and girls of the Bos- 
ton school-houses. The school report shows just as good 
practical supervision of the schools, just as thorough an 
acquaintance and satisfaction with the conditions of the 
schools, and just as fair a command of the English lan- 
guage on the part of the citizens in committee, as the Bos- 
ton school report with all its costly supervision. There are 
nft fine moral suggestions that a man must fear himself, 
but there is the practical suggestion that the North 
school-house wants cleansing and paint inside and some 
grading of the grounds. The East is in good condition, 
but as a matter of economy we would recommend a 
coat of paint on the outside and suggest that the wood- 
shed has never been painted. Not a word is spoken 
about organizing examination of teachers ; but all red 
tape is severed at a single snip by the resolution at the 
beginning of the year not to employ from " out of 
town any but experienced teachers, with good recom- 
mendations, both as to their moral character and fitness 
as teachers." I may add that as a result three of the 
four male teachers were college-bred men, and all were 



276 Salary of Teachers. 

"gentlemen of good character, faithful and efficient ■ 
teachers' securing the confidence of their pupils and 
discharging all their duties satisfactorily." 

Yet the last annual report of the Board of Education 
gives the present annual income of the school fund as 
$140,369, and the additional sfertling statement made 
in the simplest manner and reported in the newspapers 
without comment as if unto this end was the school- 
fund foreordained from the foundation of the world : 
"About half the income goes to meet the expenses of 
th^ Board of Education and its secretary, and especial 
agents who are engaged in holding teachers' institutes 
and visiting schools. The remainder is divided among 
the towns whose valuation is below a certain amount.'* 
That is, half the income goes to support supernum- 
eraries who are clinging to the outside of the school 
system, only half to the real workers in the school- 
room. The Board, the agents, the visitors who go and 
come when and where they like, whp are doing the 
play-work of teaching teachers and " inspecting " 
schools, get just as much money as the village schools for 
which the money was appropriated. My hamlet aforesaid 
reports ""'from Massachusetts School Fund $216.26." 
It reaps no benefit of Board, or secretary, or teachers' 
institutes, or school visitors. It looks after its schools 
itself. It pays each of its four summer teachers $25 a 
month for five and one-fourth months. What the Board 



Salary of Teachers. . 277 

of Education and the teachers institutes and the special 
examiners do for us is to take away from every child in 
town two months of schooling which he would other- 
wise have and which it is supposed the school fund was 
founded to furnish him. And this bread is taken out of 
the children's mouths and given to the educational tramps 
who " traipse " across the country holding teachers' insti- 
tutes either in term time when teachers ought to be 
teaching, or in vacation when they ought to be recreating. 

"While," says the Boston School Report, "the 
committee do not admit, what could hardly be admitted 
by Bostonians, that the schools of Boston are inferior 
in any respect to the schools of any other place on the 
face of the globe, they are prepared to assert the opin- 
ion that too much is undertaken in our schools and 
consequently too little is accomplished at a much larger 
expense than if the requirements were more reason- 
able." 

In this statement, Boston comes perhaps as near as 
she ever will come to the admission that " God alone 
is great." Not falling one hair's-breadth behind her 
leadership of every " other place on the face of the 
globe," she does virtually confess that she has not at- 
tained the mark for the prize of her own high calling. 
As our whilom superintendent would say, she fears 
only one thing, she fears herself. She has outstripped 
all competition ; she has now only to make a jump on 



278 Salary of Teachers. 

her own account and get ahead of herself. Candor 
compels me to admit that she has done it. 

She says, sharing the universal naivete," The largest 
item of expense for carrying on our schools is that for 
salaries." But she redeems her naivete by the next 
statement : " The committee believe that this item can 
be reduced by discontinuing the services of some spe- 
cial and needless teachers." The committee proceed 
thereupon to disband the Kindergarten, to curtail the 
Sewing School, to dismiss some of the supervisors. 
All these are steps in the right direction. 

But the Boston School Report of the present year, 
1879, as appears in the Boston Journal, makes with 
preternatural tranquillity the most startling revelations. 
It says : '' Notwithstanding an increase of more than 
1200 pupils in the public schools, the expenses, as 
compared with those of last year, have been reduced 
$62,453.17. The estimated expenditure for the next 
school year is $55,819 less than the estimate for 1878-9 
though a trifle more than the actual expense for that 
year. 

Doubtless the work of expenditure can be carried 
still further if the committees having separate inter- 
ests in charge severally cooperate in the wishes and 
purpose of the board as a whole." 

And in the very next paragraph the report " con- 
demns the policv of crowding so many pupils into one 



Salary of TeacJiers. 279 

room, and in speaking of the consequent strain upon 
female teachers — a strain so great that the average ab- 
sence of female teachers on account of sickness hr.3 
been three times as great as that of male teachciT — 
suggests the advisability of forming a corps of assistant 
teachers composed of those who have passed tl: rough 
our schools and received certificates of qualification, to 
relieve the primary teachers an hour a day by teaching 
in their presence and with the benefit of their sugges- 
tions." 

Think of it — Boston, the Athens of America, the foun- 
tain of culture, the original hunting-ground of refine- 
ment, a city set on a hill, on three hills, and not half 
high enough at that for the world to contemplate — Boston 
quietly chucks her children into Black Holes and then 
congratulates herself on having reduced her expen- 
ditures ! She could reduce her expenses probably 
another fifty thousand dollars if, instead of slowly suf- 
focating her pupils in crowded rooms with a slowly 
suffocating female teacher, she would simply take them 
out on the bridge and drop them into Charles river. 

But what is her remedy for her crowded rooms? 
Nothing less than the extraordinary device of putting 
more people in them ! It is not suggested to have 
more rooms or fewer pupils ; to relieve the teacher by 
taking a few classes or a single class from her and 
giving them to another's care ; but into her crowded 



28o Salary of Teachers. 

room is to come another woman without experience, 
without responsibility, without pay, to do bunglingly 
what the teacher does skilfully. That is, the teacher, 
besides teaching the children, has to teach an appren- 
tice ! This is relieving the teachers indeed. And as if 
to leave no stone unturned of inpracticability, this in- 
experienced and unpaid helpmeet is to be embarrassed 
and hampered by teaching under the eyes of an experi- 
enced and self-possessed teacher. It is difficult for a 
veteran teacher to do her work well when watched. 
To a neophyte it would be practically impossible. 

It is perfectly easy to lower the salaries of teachers. 
There will be no decrease of teachers because of any 
reduction of salaries. Indeed low-price teachers are 
easier to come at than high-price teachers. Doubtless 
the mayor of Syracuse is right in saying that even good 
teachers can sometimes be obtained at less than $380 a 
year. The little village of which I have spoken got its 
good teachhers at the rate of $250 a ye^r. And when Bos- 
ton and Syracuse, and San Francisco, have reduced their 
teachers' salaries ten, twenty, thirty per cent., there will 
be no immediate revolution. The teachers will not 
retire in a body, leaving the children to run into "the 
streets. The parents will not generally or immediately 
know that anything has happened. Just the same the 
influence will be baleful. The schools will deteriorate. 
The children will suffer. The one thing needful to a 



Salary of Teachers. 281 

good school is a good teacher. The contact of a large, 
cultivated mind, association with a genial, gentle, cour- 
teous, upright, inflexible nature — that is the one good 
gift to our children. The character, the personality of 
theteacher,^is more influential upon the child than books. 
Three months of a gentleman, of a lady, of a scholar, 
are worth more to the child than twelve months of a 
drone, a dolt, a clown, a vulgarian. The salary of a 
day-laborer, of a housemaid, of a field-hand will not 
attract the best class of persons into the schoolroom. 
They may sometimes put into such port, under stress of 
weather, but it is only temporarily. With wages at the 
lowest living point our schools will receive only tke 
dregs of all other professions, the raw material of all 
occupations. The men and women who are not good 
for anything else will be teachers. The young people 
who mean to be something else will step on our schools 
to reach it. The rich will educate their children at 
private schools under accomplished teachers. The 
poor will drag along still more heavily than they now 
drag, under more and more coarse and ignorant teach- • 
ers. 

The only direction which economy should take, the 
only direction which real economy can take is to lop 
off superfluities and build up necessities. School- 
houses, furniture, machinery should be reduced to their 

lowest terms, and teachers should be raised to the 
24 



2S2 Salary of Teachers, 

highest power. All the money that can be spent in 
securing good teaching is money well spent. 

Yet when the superintending mind is directed to the 
necessity of better teaching, it passes over the ap- 
pliances for education which already exist, and sees in 
the acknowledged necessity only an opportunity for 
more system, more organization, more cost. Just 
as if schools and academies and colleges were not 
already open to as many as 'wish to enter, one 
of our sapient superintendents at a recent conven- 
tion advocated "that in order to establish teaching as 
a profession, it would be well for each State to institute 
a corporate board of instructors who shall examine can- 
'didates for positions in the public schools, and that 
they may be organized as a corporate college of precep- 
tors, who shall fix a course in which all the candidates 
must be proficient, and that the college give them a 
license to teach for a certain number of years." 

Of course this corporate board of instructors and 
this corporate college of preceptors is not expected to 
work for nothing. All the preceptors and the instruc- 
tors are to have a handsome salary from the State — so 
that the proposal for better teachers starts off with a 
whole new set of outside salaried officials to begin with, 
but without a single penny to spend on the actual ed- 
ucation of the actual teachers who are to go into the 
schoolrooms and do the work. 



Salary of Teachers. 283 

But we may say, if it does not educate teachers, it 
secures teachers who are educated. How does it se- 
cure them unless the State make a law that no one 
shall teach in the public schools until he has been 
licensed by the precious board of preceptors ? Is the 
State likely to make such a law ? Are the towns likely 
to submit to a law which shall limit their choice of teach- 
ers to the judgment of a board of preceptors a hundred 
miles away? If these laws are not made, what is the 
board of preceptors going to do about it ? After the 
board has carefully whittled itself out and seated its 
corporation around the table waiting for its candidates 
to come up and be examined, will they be likely to 
come ? When a young man has his diploma from Exe- 
ter Academy and a young woman has hers from 
Bradford, is it at all probable that they will file out to 
Worcester to get a license from an unknown Board of pre- 
ceptors to teach in the Andover and Bradford primary 
schools ? Is it at all probable that Bradford and An- 
dover will require or wish them to do it ? 

The way to make teaching a profession is to require 
the same education for it as for other professions. 
There is no royal road to learning for schoolmasters 
any more than for clergymen. When as large a propor- 
tion of teachers as of lawyers are distinguished for in- 
tellectual acumen and intellectual cultivation, teaching • 
will rank as high as the law. All the instructors of 



284 Salary of Teachers. 

New England may incorporate themselves into a col- 
lege and hold themselves in readiness to paste th'e pro- 
fessional label on the backs of all candidates, but they 
will not hasten the coming of that day by one second. 
And when that day comes the corporation of preceptors 
may instantly disband, for no bona fide college graduate 
will so much as lift his hand to receive the preceptoral 
diploma. He has the real article. 

It is not the college or the high school alone that 
needs the highly educated teacher. The lowest class 
of the lowest primary needs her just as much. The 
cultivated mind tells in the ABC class as much as in 
the Greek class. I wish that no teacher might enter 
our schoolrooms who had not at least completed an 
academy course of study, or its equivalent. The natu- 
ral teacher is benefited by it even more than the teacher 
who is made, not born. The only justification of our 
present low salaries is that so many of our teachers are 
worth no more. They have little education, small 
preparation. Some of our male teachers are mere 
figure-heads, kept in place only by the work of female 
assistants. They do not earn their salaries. Some 
of our women are absolutely unfit to teach. But the 
true remedy is not to retain these teachers on low or 
reduc'e them to lower salaries, but dismiss them altogeth- 
er. We cannot afford them. They are dear at any 
price. Any teacher who does not fully earn his present 



Salary of Teachers, 285 

salary earns nothing. A very large majority of our chil- 
dren have only the few years of the primary, the gram- 
mar, the district school, for the intellectual preparation 
of their life. What they do of study must be done 
quickly. They must go to shop and farm, to kitchen 
and sewing-machine, with only such training, such ed- 
ucation as they can get during these few years. It is 
cruel that they should not have the best. The college, 
high school, academy, will take care of their own. 
The great mass have only the primary state schooling. 
It ought to be poured into them and evolved out of 
them at every moment by the best known methods. 
The very best minds, the very highest cultivation, the 
most refined taste, the most polite manners, should be 
set up in the common schools for example and in- 
struction so that the pupil should have before him not 
simply his books and his time, but a model of behavior, a 
fountain of wisdom, a pattern ; so that in his play as well 
as in his study, when he goes out and when he comes in, 
he shall associate with a superior intelligence, and shall 
thus unconsciously himself acquire elevation of mind and 
grandeur of character. 
24* 



THE DEGRADATION OF THE 
TEACHER. 



THE DEGRADATION OF THE 
TEACHER. 

IF I have said it nine hundred and ninty-nine times, 
let me now say it for the thousandth time with the 
emphasis which our " system" compels, that it is not 
Boards, nor superintendents, nor committees, that decide 
the character of schools : it is the teacher ; and the 
teacher should be the centre of dignity and the deposi- 
tary of power. One of the most fatal possible mistakes 
in any administration is to impose responsibility with- 
out conferring power. It is not just to make a man 
accountable for that which he does not control. We 
sometimes speak of the abuse of patronage; but no 
abuse can be greater than to deniand reckoning of the 
head of any department, yet give him no power to 
select or to remove his assistants, or to devise and ad- 
just his own methods. Teachers are the persons on 
whom rests the blame or the praise of the schools ; 
and to them should power belong. If a teacher is not 
capable of managing her own class, the remedy is not 

(2S9) 



290 The Degradatio7i of the Teacher. 

to set a superior- officer to manage her, but to dismiss 
her, and put a competent teacher in her place. If a 
principal have not sense enough to know and conscience 
enough to perform his school duties, the remedy is to 
dismiss him \ not to make a rule that every principal 
shall teach three hours a day. That does not put 
brains into his skull nor honor into his blood. It not only 
insults and incenses every worthy principal, but it leaves 
the worthless principal to drag out his slow length just as 
uselessly as before. The relation of teachers to superin- 
tendent, or committee, or principal, is not the relation of 
rank and file to a colonel or general, nor of railroad em- 
ployes to president and directors : it is rather that of a 
clergyman to the parish officers, or of a representative to 
his constituents, or of an editor to his subscribers. 
The teacher is a servant hired by the community through 
the committee, but a servant serving through his intel- 
lect — a servant to whose judgment much must be left \ 
who is responsible for results, but whose methods are 
not to be dictated; who is to be consulted, who may be 
advised, who can be dismissed, but who is never to be 
ordered. 

In a well-instructed community and a well-arranged 
school, there is no clashing of authority. Committee, 
superintendent, principal and assistants respect each 
other, and work together for the common good. Any 
other course is suicidal. It is strange that there should 



The Degradation of the Teacher. Z'^i 

ever be any other. Teaching is so much easier, 
the machinery runs so much more smoothly, the pupils 
are so much better taught, when officers work in har- 
mony, and all bear themselves as ladies and gentlemen, 
that self-indulgence alone would seem to prescribe this 
course. Yet other courses are taken. Committees will 
sometimes issue orders without consultation, and against 
the judgment of a large majority of the teachers to whom 
the orders are conveyed. They issue orders which im- 
ply in teachers a lack of discretion that ought to be fatal 
to their existence as teachers. Text-books are changed, 
new departments of instruction are introduced, radically 
different methods of teaching are attempted by commit- 
tee or by principals, without request from the teachers, 
without consultation with the teachers, against the ad- 
vice and protest of the teachers, and the very teachers 
who are most closely concerned, and whose hearty co- 
operation ought to be essential to the success of the 
experiment. 

If the principal of a school is not fit to judge of the 
text-books and methods proper to his own school, he is 
not fit to be principal. Yet a member of the school 
committee in Washington was reported in the morning 
papers, not long since, to have objected to consulting 
teachers regarding text-books, on the ground that it was 
not dignified or desirable for employers to consult those 
they employed. It seems hardly possible for ignorance 



292 The Degradation of the Teacher, 

and vulgarity combined to go so far. If the assistant 
teachers are not worthy of being consulted on such 
topics, they are not worthy to be teachers. Do not 
parents and teachers alike see that, in all these dis- 
cords, children are the real sufferers? Whatever 
lowers the dignity of the teacher injures the status of 
the child. If the teacher have no dignity, it is wrong 
to impose him upon the child. If parents do not wish 
their children to be taught by menials, they should not 
engage menials, nor expect teachers to play the part of 
menials. If teachers wish their occupation to be con- 
sidered as a profession of dignity and honor, they 
should maintain their own dignity unimpaired, whether 
against principal, or superintendent, or committee, or 
complaining parent, or each other. If the committee 
wish effective work, successful schools, they should, by 
every point of their own demeanor, by every courtesy 
of bearing, and suavity of intercourse, maintain in 
themselves and in teachers self-respect, and minister to 
respect, deporting themselves always as gentlemen 
to gentlemen and to ladies. If teachers are not ladies 
and gentlemen, they should be dismissed for those who 
are. If this is not possible, still more should they be 
won over to grace by grace, to culture by culture. 
Trouble never comes this way. Trouble comes always 
by arrogance, ignorance, assumption, and incivility. 
In a school thoroughly furnished with all the modern 



The Degradation of the Teacher, 293 

improvements a boy, the son of a member of the school 
committee, was frequently late. The regulations of the 
school required the teacher to receive a "satisfactory 
excuse." His teacher considered a written excuse from 
parents the only satisfactory one and required it of all 
her pupils. Every teacher understands, and every in- 
telligent person will readily understand, that, this does 
not mean an explanation of the causes of the pupil's 
absence or lateness, but is in the nature of a certificate 
from the parent that he is aware and approves of his 
child's course. This boy's father either through lack 
of original endowment, or the defective training of Har- 
vard college, or the depressing effects of official life, 
found himself unable to cope with this intricate problem 
and when reluctantly obliged to send notes for his son's 
non-appearance produced such specimens as the follow- 
ing : "Walter's absence, or rather tardiness yesterday 
was caused by his going to town with me." 

"Walter's tardiness this morning was owing to his 
being too deeply interested in his occupation to remem- 
ber how late it was." 

"I hereby certify that at two o'clock p. m., on Mon- 
day, Jan. 22, 1877, the physical condition of Walter C. 
Committee was not such as to allow of his being 
sent to school." 

"A member of the school committee came in to dis- 
cuss the salary question, and thereby caused the boys to 
25 



294 '^^^^ Deg7'adatio7i of the Teacher, 

be late to school by preventing the dinner from being 
served in time." 

When an office-holder chooses to put his domestic 
affairs into his official communications, it maybe admis- 
sible to suggest w^hat would otherwise be an imperti- 
nence that, in the benighted realm of ungraded schools, 
the presence of a friend is not considered a reason for 
keeping dinner off the table, but rather for hurrying it 
on ! If dinner is never to be eaten until guests are 
safely out of the house, no wonder that master Walter's 
" physical condition " interferes with his intellectual 
pursuits, and no wonder master Walter's papa dislikes 
to give a note every time ! 

Finally, the poor gentleman's overstrained patience 
snapped. The boy came in late on Monday morning 
and took his seat without a word. His teacher called 
him to her desk and asked for his note. He replied 
that he hadn't any. He had to take care of his sister. 

*• Did your father know you were late ? " 

"Yes." 

" Bring your note in the afternoon." 

In the afternoon he took his seat again silently. His 
teacher asked him for the note. 

" Father was busy and could not write it." 

" Will he be any less busy in the morning ?" 

" I don't know." 

*' You may bring your note in the morning." 



The Degradation , of the Teacher. 295 

The morning came and again no note. 

'* Where is your note, Walter ?" 

" Father was as busy as he was yesterday and could 
not write it." 

" You may bring me that note this afternoon without 
fail. Be sure that it is done." 

Afternoon came. The embarrassed boy loitered a 
little at the teacher's desk while passing and she asked 
him if he had anything to say to her. 

'' No." 

" Did you bring your note ?" 

" Father was eating his dinner and said he could not 
write a note then." 

She of course could not blame the boy, but resolved 
to have recourse to the father after school. Before 
dismissal, however, this helpful and sensible committee 
came to the schoolhouse and informed the teacher that 
he had come to see why she wanted so many letters ! 

" I do not want any letters. I only want the notes 
of excuse. I think it very hard for you to make all this 
trouble on so small a point. ^ How am I to decide in 
any other way ? I know the rules do not say ' written ' 
but ' satisfactory ,' and an excuse is not satisfactory to 
me unless it is written by the parent. If I require 
notes from George and Thomas and James and William 
and Harry, how can I draw the line and excuse Walter 
or any other pupil ? Even Edith, who is as near perfection 



296 The Degt-adation of the Teacher. 

as a girl can be and in whom I fully trust, always 
brings me a note. I cannot say to her 'you need not 
bring me one ' and to James ' you must bring me a 
note, I can't trust you;' and to George ' I am not sure 
whether I can trust you or not, so you must bring me a 
note.' In such a case I should be continually in trouble 
with the parents." 

It would be little to ask that a man who is on the 
school committee should have intelligence and imagina- 
tion enough to see this without taking private lessons 
in it; but it seems otherwise to the gods. Our com- 
mittee was not convinced. ''It is nevertheless very 
singular," he replied, " that a boy in this room is obliged 
to bring notes while his brother in another room is fully 
trusted. It seems very strange to his parents. Have 
you ever made any inquiries of the other teachers as to 
their methods ?" 

" I have talked with Miss A. She felt that she ought 
to have been very particular in requiring notes but 
feared she had been very lax." 

" Have you said anything to anybody else ?" 

"Yes, to Miss B. I have told her of all the trouble 
I have had in getting notes in this case." 

'' Did she say she required notes ?" 

"I never asked her." 

" Should you judge she did require them ?'* 



The Degradation of the Teacher. 297 

** Yes, from what I know of her, I feel very sure she 
requires them." 

" Are there no rules of the building that all follow?" 

"I know of none." 

Here the committee had struck a trail which, if he 
had been bright enough to follow it, would have led 
him out of the woods. But his eyes were holden, and 
after talking half an hour longer he turned to go saying, 
"Well, I guess you shall have your note in the 
morning." 

But the teacher called him back saying, " I do not 
want you simply to say I may have the note. I want 
you to tell me whether \ am right or wrong. If I am 
wrong I will try to see where and how I can do better. 
If I am right I wish you to tell me so. I want it fully 
settled now, that I may have no more trouble." 

Confronting thus the awful necessity of a decision, 
Mr. Committee met the emergency with comparative 
energy : " Well, yes, as you feel about it I suppose it 
is right. At any rate you shall have your note." 

The next morning the boy brought the note and the 
teacher fondly hoped this momentous question was set 
at rest forever. Vain illusion ! There is a mental 
machinery so ponderous that when once started it seems 
to revolve by its own inertia. 

The second morning after, as the teacher went into 
her room, she was followed by Mr. Committee who said 
25* 



298 The Degradation of tJ=c Teacher. 

to her, " I only wanted to say that I have been making 
inquiries of some of the teachers and I find it has not 
been the custom to demand written notes, and though 
I think perhaps you have gone too far to make any al- 
teration this year, yet another 3^ear 1 should advise a dif- 
ferent course, and not draw the line as tightly as you 
have this." 

A few mornings after he came again, saying he would 
like to speak to the teacher when she had leisure and 
then asked if she^had a copy of the School Regulations 
printed in 1870 or before. 

''Yes, somewhere, but I don't know that I can find it 
at once." 

" I have a copy, but I cannot find it. I did not know 
until last night that the word 'written ' was ever used. 
I have found that it was used and that afterward the 
word 'satisfactory' was substituted. 

" But / never knew the word ' written ' was there at 
all. You have not misunderstood me, I hope. I knew 
I had no authority from the committee so far as that 
word was concerned." 

" No, I remember you said it was ^^ov^x own idea." 

The next morning Mr. Committee was encountered 
in the hall. He only came to say that he had carried 
the old Report to her room and had found that the word 
" written " was in a Report prior to his connection with 
the schools. 



The Dcg7'adation of the Teacher. 299 

When the teacher went to school Monday morning, 
she found him bright and early on the steps. Unlock- 
ing the door for him he accompanied her in and, though 
stopping a moment on the lower floor, followed her to 
her room before she had time to remove her wrappings. 
He came " to ask if she really believed that no child's 
verbal excuse was a satisfactory one, and why did she 
not require the notes to be written in French or German ; 
she might have done so with just as much propriety as 
to require them at all," and so on and so on. It is not 
necessary to go over the whole old ground again. 

The frequent appearance of Walter's papa presently 
became a mild jest with the other teachers, who would 
inquire of Walter's teacher if "her apparition " was 
coming to-day ? It was finally suggested that the whole 
matter be decided by referring it to the whole committee 
for authoritative and final decision. One of the teachers, 
therefore, one who had been many years in the school, 
and who, during the absence of the principal, had been 
selected by the committee to preside over the school 
with its fourteen teachers and six hundred pupils, and 
had done so with entire ease and success, and in perfect 
harmony with all her fellow teachers, wrote to the school 
committee : 

^' I learn that a membeV of the school committee 
has taken exceptions to the requirement of a written 
excuse for his son's absence or tardiness. 



300 The Degradation of the Teacher. 

" Having been in the habit, for a long term of years, 
of requiring such notes from my pupils, on the princi- 
ple that no child's verbal excuse was a ' satisfactory ' 
one, I ask the decision of the Board, whether I have 
acted contrary to the spirit of the school regulations ?" 

To the e3^e of the un-system-atic " educator," it would 
seem that this was not only a proper 'but the proper 
thing to do. It is hardly conceivable, in the first place, 
that any actual human organization is on so microscopic 
a scale as to be able to make a disputed point of so 
small and simple and open a matter ; but since the 
point was disputed, the one way to settle it was to ask 
the decision of the Board, and have the understanding 
clear and the practice uniform. 

The decision of this efficient Board — consisting of 
fourteen grown men — was to return the letter unan- 
swered. And there has never been any answer; and 
the committee has never made any decision ; and for 
aught I know, the gentle committee-man is pottering 
around after the female teachers to this very day. 

Is it any- wonder that Massachusetts is imploring 
women to come to the rescue of her schools, and to cast 
a vote in school matters ? 

After this discourtesy from the committee, the 
teacher maintained perfect silence upon the matter, until 
the close of the term. At the examination, her depart- 
ment received special commendation from the commit- 



The Degradation of the Teacher. 301 

tee. At their regular meeting she was, as usual, re- 
elected. At the last moment, receiving no apology 
from the committee, she sent in her resignation, not to 
the Committee, but to her principal. This resignation 
the principal put into the hands of that member of the 
Committee who had special charge of this school, and 
Walter's teacher put also into the hands of one of the 
Committee a statement of the discussion between her- 
self and another member of the committee, which had 
been the object of the question. And with this knowl- 
edge of the resignation of the teacher, and of the 
cause of that resignation, the committee had the hardi- 
hood, formally to order, and publicly to declare, in the 
newspapers, twelve days after the teacher had resigned, 
" that she be dismissed !" giving no hint that she had 
herself resigned ; or that any action had been taken in 
the case, except their own act of dismissal. 

I have given this at some length and at the risk of 
fatiguing my readers, because it illustrates in so many 
ways the degradation, which our school system is con- 
stantly and rapidly suffering. And I shall further risk 
the fatigue of my readers by specifying to parents the 
points to which I beg their particular attention. 

I. There can be no effectiveness in teaching if teaching 
is to be at the mercy of petty and pestering intermed- 
dling under the guise of supervision. The vital energy 
and nervous force expended in meeting a petty official 



302 The Deg7'adation of the Teacher. 

bothering over notes of excuse are greater than that ex- 
pended legitimately by the teacher upon her whole class. 
That is, a committee-man springing up like a Jack-i'-the- 
box on every doorstep, and protruding like a skeleton 
from every closet, will absorb the vitality of the teach- 
ers and rob so much from the pupils. 

2. The multiplication of machinery makes trouble and 
does not save it, at the same time that it is degrading 
the teacher into a machine. The trouble in this case 
came neither from teacher nor pupil, but from the com- 
mittee, purely and solely. It is true that the committee 
protested after the matter was over that he had not been 
acting as committee. Terrified apparently at the result 
of his intermeddling he vow^ed that he had not been in- 
termeddling ; that he had no authority in this school, 
that it belonged to another committee. But when he 
was haunting the teacher at her downsitting and up- 
rising and advising her the next term to conform to his 
notions, he was either speaking as a member of the 
school committee, or as a very impertinent private 
citizen. 

3. The kind of person who will be willing to take the 
petty and minute supervision which our " system " re- 
quires and advocates, is a petty and minute sort of person 
and his influence upon the schools will be a belittling 
influence. No man is going to act as nursery governess 
to female school-teachers who is good for anything else. 



The Degradation of the Teacher, 303 

The men who are capable of doing a man's work in the 
world will have no time to spend in twitching a woman's 
apron-strings and hindering her from doing hers. When 
therefore we remove the schools from the authority of 
the teachers and put them under the control, in all 
minute points, of outside persons we are deliberately 
placing them under the control of mediocrity and infe- 
riority. 

4. The tendency of our " system " is to degrade the 
teachers more and more by the perhaps unconscious sub- 
jection of the teacher's duties to the machinery. I have 
shown before how the " advise" of the regulations be- 
came the "direct" of the superintendent. Here the 
regulations honored the teacher by demanding an ex- 
cuse which should be " satisfactory." The committee 
dishonored the teacher by attempting to prescribe the . 
kind of excuse which should be satisfactory. Put the 
teacher is the person designated alike by the regulations 
and by reason to decide what sort of excuse shall be satis- 
factory. It is true that the committee complained bitterly 
after the mischief was done that he had not " decided," 
that he had only advised ; but he bewailed with equal 
bitterness the impression that he was acting as a parent 
claiming immunity for his own boy, maintaining that 
he was acting solely from principle. But when the teach- 
ers sought to get from the committee an authoritative 
settlement of the matter as a question of principle, they 



304 The Degradation of the Teacher. 

received what, among gentlemen, is considered as rank 
a mark of disrespect as can be shown, the return of the 
letter unanswered ; while the original sinner took the 
" decision " into her own spirited little hands, in the 
most personal and un-principle-d manner, by informing 
the committee-man that she considered the action of 
his Board disrespectful and cowardly; and that, from 
this time, if his boy were absent or tardy every morn- 
ing and afternoon she would never ask him for a note, 
and should require one from every other scholar in 
school. But though fourteen men together can bravely 
attack an absent woman, one man alone in a woman's 
presence is an inappreciable force ; so the poor com- 
mittee-man took his punishment meekly and gave no 
sign, nor ever moved the wing, or opened his mouth, 
or peeped for his " principle.'' But if a father of pupils 
and a member of the school committee, four limes send^ 
to his boy's teacher an impertinent note of excuse, and 
four times refuses to send her any excusd at all, and five 
times goes to her school-room to inquire and to rcmon- 
sttate, and ends with allowing the propriety of the 
teacher's pursuing her own course the remainder of the 
year, but advises her to adopt his course afterwards, and 
all the while is not acting as a parent for his child, nor as 
a committee having authority ; then I maintain that the 
"system " should provide a teacher with some unerring 
test, by which she shall be able to know when to elimi- 



The Degi'udation of the Teacher. 305 

nate from her interlocutor his quality of parent and of 
committee and when to be aware that she is talking 
only wath the residuum of a man ! 

5. The ruinous condition of the official mind is pal- 
pable in the committee's concern, not that his boy was 
absent or tardy so much but that his father was obliged 
to write " so many letters " about it. The annoyance is 
to be prevented not by sending the boy promptly to 
school, but by shifting the trouble of excusing him from 
official' shoulders ! Is it,safe, is it wise, to subject our 
schools to the control of outside men who have no. 
responsibility for teaching, and who think promptness 
at school of no importance except as the required ex- 
cuse for absence disturbs their own dinner? 

6. The multiplication of officers and the piling up of 
machinery increase the danger of inefficiency and in- 
justice by distributing and so destroying responsibility. 
In this instance a teacher of ^unquestioned ability, con- 
firmed by long-continued success, Was in substance 
officially and slanderously attacked by a committee, 
every man of whom in personal and individual associa- 
tion w^ould no doubt bear himself towards all women as 
is the habit of x'\merican gentlemen. It chanced that 
no mischief was wrought in this case because the teach- 
er was of independent resources and of a position which 
commanded a choice ; but it might just as easily have 
happened to one whose necessities or whose responsi- 

26* 



3o6 The Degradatio7i of the Teacher. 

bilities would have compelled her to remain, or to whose 
reputation in the commencement of her career^ the 
slanderous report of dismissal might have been seriously 
injurious if not fatal. These men officially and collec- 
tively allowed themselves to be betrayed into a flagrant 
discourtesy and injustice, because the " system " is con- 
stantly degrading teachers into menials and concentrat- 
ing authority and dignity in the hands of outside men, 
who have nothing whatever to do with the actual teach- 
ing and have the slightest possible contact with the 
children. 

Teachers themselves are not always so mindful of 
each other's dignity as the instinct of self-preservation 
should make them. 

Avery amusing discussion was reported in the papers 
a while ago. An organized company of teachers were 
considering whether the interests of the schools would be 
promoted by increasing the relative number of male 
teachers. One gentleman thought it was a conceded fact, 
that women could teach primary schools better than men, 
but that other schools could be better taught by men. 
Another gentleman thought that male teachers were too 
few, and that men should come in and occupy many of 
the places now held by women, because nineteen out of 
twenty young women who enter into the occupation of 
teaching do it not with the view of making it a life-work ; 
they do not study with the view of rising higher and 



The Degradation of the Teacher. 807 

higher ; women intend to teach but a comparatively short 
time, and therefore do not prepare themselves to teach 
in the high schools. Another thought the time women 
devoted to preparing their minds and hearts for teach- 
ing is much too short, and that their shortness of service 
is a reason that they are less devoted and earnest as 
teachers than men. They have less learning, and less 
time to learn, than men ; one reason being the time they 
are obHged to spend in sewing. Another thought, that, 
if schools should be raised to the highest standard, they 
should have at their head those who intend to make it a 
business for life. Let as many as possible who teach 
in the schools be trained as well as possible, and then . 
be under the direction of a head who will make it a 
business. One poor woman is reported to have piped 
a plaintive note of dissent by affirming that, if men 
had to make their own coats and iron their own collars, 
they would not have much time to devote to studying. 
But generally the men seem to have had everything 
their own way. 

It is not, perhaps, quite fair to accept a newspaper 
presentation as accurate ; but the reporters and the 
teachers laid their heads together with a result similar 
to that suggested by Sydney Smith's wit. 

The gentlemen seem rather to have assumed the 
question than to have discussed it. They were more 
occupied, apparently, in accounting for their own superi- 



3o8 The Degradation of the Teacher, 

ority than in discovering it. But says a superintendent, 
of schools in the same state and neighborhood, in his 
report : — 

'•The profession of teaching has no dignity. It is fre- 
quently, I had ahnost said, in the majority of cases, entered 
upon as a makeshift or a stepping-stone, and is generally 
regarded by the man himself, and always by the public, as a 
work of which one should rather be ashamed than proud . . . 
The pride a lawyer feels in his profession, and the want of it 
felt by a teacher in his, is but a reflection of public sentiment, 
and is generally well grounded. The public demands training 
and culture of its lawyers, and accepts almost anything in 
its teachers." 

After such an arraignment, it is a Httle odd to see a 
body of male teachers assembling themselves together 
for the purpose of painfully trying to find why it is 
that they know so much more than women, and con- 
cluding that it is because they stick to their business 
so much better. Writing as I am in a community 
where schools have always been taught by men, and 
always by men who have failed in some other business 
in the past, or who have been preparing for some 
other business in the future, or who have been eking 
out the insufficient returns of some other business pur- 
sued in connection with teaching ; never, to the best of 
my knowledge and belief, by men with whom teaching 
was meant to be a business for life, I own I am sur- 



The Degradation of the Teacher. 309 

prised at the short range of those who can stand up 
and say before the country, that the reason men are so 
superior to women is because women do not make it a 
life-work. 

Suppose that instead of trying to find out why men 
are more earnest, devoted, and effective teachers than 
women, we spend a little time in ascertaining whether 
they are such. It is a matter difficult to prove ; but 
perhaps we can approximate a conclusion. I have 
never known in New England any woman who attained 
distinction in teaching, or who ever, for a series of years, 
maintained her place at the head of a seminary or any 
academy, or any school as high in rank as a grammar 
school, without earning her honors ; without being- 
recognized as a woman of decided individual merit, as 
well as mark ; without being, outside of her school- 
room, an acknowledged social influence. 

But I have repeatedly seen men in such positions, 
whose mental acquisitions and endowments were notice- 
abl}'' moderate ; who, as men, had small social or 
political weight ; who owed their position more to tact, 
and in some cases to truckling, than to teaching ; and 
who, without the superior efficiency of their female sub- 
ordinates, could not have maintained themselves for a 
month. One of the largest and most influential news- 
papers of New York, in an editorial article remarkable 
for its insinht — so remarkable that I think it must 



3IO T7ie Degradation of the Teacher. 

have been written by a woman — says: "The simple 
truth is, teachers are the rarest men in the world. . . . 
There are plenty of men who feel called to get a living 
by being teachers. ... It would go hard, but he (a 
principal) did not get one or two persons among his 
teaching force that are really good teachers. . But . . 
there are not good teachers enough in the whole coun- 
try to teach properly the children of the single State 
of New York. Nay, but this statement is absurdly 
short of what might justly be said. There are not 
born and made teachers enough in the whole country 
to teach the children of New York city alone as they 
should be taught." I have yet to see any college-bred 
male or female principal of high school or academy, 
who would admit that the female assistants were less 
efficient than the male. I have yet to see any father 
or mother of sound judgment, or, for that matter, of 
any sort of judgment who considered the children to 
be less thoroughly taught by a woman than by a man. 
I have yet to see any pupils who complain of the infe- 
rior discipline of female as compared with male train- 
ing. Reflecting on sundry male teachers we have 
known, to whom the greatest boon that justice could grant 
would be the mercy of its silence, and the many women, 
cultivated, ladylike, self-reliant, commanding, thorough, 
untiring; and then listening to the felicitations of that 
group of schoolmasters over their own assumed superi- 



The Drjy-radatwn of the Teacher. 311 

ority, the onl}^ appropriate argument in response seems 
to be that of the poet : 

'• To take them as I would mischievous boys, 
And shake their heads together." 

They said (and experts have said something like it) 
that "women have less nervous energy and physical 
force " than men, and, therefore, cannot make so good 
teachers, cannot last so long. That may be ; but the 
point is not how much force a teacher has, but how 
much he uses. If a man is lazy and will not work, he 
is no better teacher than a woman who is weak, 
and cannot work. Personal and practical observation 
teaches that women expend a great deal more nervous 
force in school than men. So far from being less earnest 
and devoted than men, they are far more so. They 
throw themselves into their work with a great deal more 
whole-heartedness, with a great deal less reserve than 
men. The actual effective wearing' work of schools, 
the steady plod, is done by women. They give out, not 
because they are weak, but because they are overworked. 
There is no pursuit more absorbing, more exhaustive to 
the vital energies, than teaching. L,et men take hold 
of it as women take hold of it, not with the touch-and- 
go of a well-nigh supernumerary "head," but with 
the unrelenting grit and grip of hands, and they will 
find that their own " nervous force" has limits. If men 



312 The Degradation of the Teacher. 

wculd draw a little more generously on their abounding 
nervous force, women would not be forced to draw so 
exhaustively on their slenderer stock. Yet I have heard 
a male principal who was borne along through his 
whole school-life on the shoulders of his assistants 
affirm with childlike naivete that somehow his teach- 
ers all tired out sooner than he did ! I have known a 
male principal say to an overworked female assistant 
seeking an interview, "if it is any trouble with the 
scholars I can't bear it, I am too sensitive. You may go 
to the committee or anything, but don't come to me." 
The late Mr. S. M. Capron of Hartford taught as 
women teach, — in detail, with thoroughness. He was 
he^d and hands both. All of his school he saw ; but 
a part of his school he was. -He did not content him- 
self with "directing;" he went also into the toil and 
moil of actual teaching. He did not stand on the plat- 
form and dictate experiments : he tested himself the 
quality of the process. One of his co-laborers says, 
" He had no need to speak" [to secure from his assist- 
ants their best work]: "so high was his own standard, 
so exquisite the finish of everything he did, that he 
was himself a perpetual admonition." Alike by his 
fidelity and efficiency, by his minute and his far-reach- 
ing observation, by his fineness and his power, he com- 
manded the affection and the admiration of his teachers 
and his pupils — and he died at forty-one. 



The Degradation of the Teacher . 318 

The claim of superior knowledge set up by this 
Mutual Admiration Society of teachers seems as re- 
markable as their claim of superior earnestness. I be- 
lieve that the male teachers of our academies and high 
schools are largely college graduates; but, also, the fe- 
male teachers are largely seminary graduates. The 
women who are teaching the higher grade of schools 
have availed themselves of the best means of education 
open to them, quite as universally as have the men; 
nor do I believe that one principal in a hundred finds 
any lack of learning in his female assistants. For the 
grammar schools and the primary schools not so much 
can be said ; but how much can be said of the gram- 
mar masters ? 

"• Here," says an impatient, working, female teacher, 
"meeting after meeting has been held of grown men- 
masters, the object of which, so far as I could learn, 
was to decide whether ' five tons of Franklin coal ' should 
all begin with capitals, and should a line be left between 
the writing of the subject and the composition ? and 
similar important matters !" 

"Well," writes another female teacher, "we went to 
the teachers' meeting this afternoon. The superintend- 
ent, poor man, was at his wits' ends, to take up the time 
till the drawing teacher came, three-quarters of an hour 
later, and he could only spread over forty minutes, and 
oh ! what folly and nonsense ! The same old Walter 
27 



314 The Degj-adation of ilc Teacher. 

Smith platitudes rehashed and served out to nine able- 
bodied men — not able-minded to sit there and listen — 
and how I wished every one of them, separately and 
singly could be shut up for a day between two real men 
till they were brought to their knees in prayer and hu- 
miliation for the nonsense they had aided and abetted ! 
After several circumlocutions it was announced that it 
had been decided best to have the grammar teachers 
come together out of school hours but once a month ! 
Meanwhile, the drawing-master goes around into the 
several rooms. His coarseness exceeded Miss A's 
expectations ; but fell short of mine." 

Certainly the women can find as lively and well sus- 
tained faults with the men, as the men with the women ; 
and what reason in the nature of things why they should 
not? 

How many of the grammar schoolmasters of Boston 
and Brookline and Newton and Cambridge, of New 
York and Brooklyn and Jersey City, are college-bred 
men ? How much time did they devote to " preparing 
their minds and hearts for teaching?" and in what did 
such preparation consist ? How much of the time that 
is apent by their female assistants in sewing is spent by 
them in studying ? And, for their study, what profi- 
ciency have they to show in science, art, language, phil- 
osophy ? 

Rev. James Fraser, sent over from England to in- 



The Degradatlo7i of the Teacher. 315 

spect our schools, reports "the much greater natural ap- 
titude for the work of a teacher, possessed by Ameri- 
cans generally, and particulai'ly by American women. 
They certainly have the gift of turning what they do 
know to the best account." 

The lamentable fact is that neither male nor female 
teachers are so well educated that they can afford to 
throw stones at each other ; but when men so far forget 
propriety as to hurl them at their female assistants, it is 
the first and most imperative duty of the latter to sacri- 
fice feeling, hit back, and give good measure. Society 
does not demand educated teachers, and therefore it 
does not have them. It demands educated lawyers, 
clergymen, doctors, high-school teachers, and there- 
fore it does have them. But it sees nothing unreason- 
able in intrusting the education of a large majority of 
its children to a man who has failed as a pettifogger, 
who has broken down as a doctor, or to a girl who could 
not enter the lowest class of the high school. This is 
done simply from motives of economy. Women pre- 
ponderate in schools, not because they soften the boys, 
but because they cost less than men. One of our So- 
lons thought, that, throughout district schools, the idea 
that there is not money enough to employ gentlemen 
teachers should be dispelled. I should like to see him 
dispel it. I should like to set him down in a rural dis- 
trict I wot of, and see him convince the parents, that it 



3i6 The Degradation of tJie Teacher, 

is better for them to pay fifty dollars a summer month 
to a college sophomore than thirty to an experienced and 
successful woman. I should like to see him go into 
the city wards, and convince the parents that they would 
find their account in paying to such men as are willing 
to teach, eighteen or twenty or twenty-five hundred dol- 
lars, rather than in employing such women as they can 
get for six or eight hundred. 

When these men say that women mean to teach but 
a short time, and therefore do not prepare themselves to 
teach in the high schools, I ask, what better prepara- 
tion for teaching in the high schools exists than taking 
the high-school course of study under cultivated and 
accomplished teachers? And of those v/ho graduate 
at high schools, what is the ratio of boys to girls ? 

As a general thing, when women begin to teach, they 
have no definite idea of ceasing to teach. They give 
themselves to the work with ardor, with enthusiasm, with 
conscientiousness. They have so great a natural fit- 
ness for teaching, that defects of education are more 
largely atoned for than society has any right to expect. 
Many of them never marry : none of them, apparently, 
give themselves so much concern about it as these gen- 
tlemen seem to have given for them. But whether 
they marry or not, the qualities which fit them for mar- 
riage fit them for teaching. Unlike any other profes- 
sion, this is in the line of their natural life. What 



The Degradation of the Teacher. 317 

makes a woman the successful head of a school makes 
her successful as head of a family. I venture to affirm, 
that the ranks of silly, characterless, inefficient wives 
and mothers have never been recruited from the ranks 
of successful school-teachers. Unless a girl is en- 
gaged to be married at the time she begins teaching, 
she enters upon her work with as much whole-hearted- 
ness as if she meant to teach all her life ; and gener- 
ally she works as faithfully, she is as acceptable to the 
parents, as much respected by the pupils, as much 
esteemed by her comrades, as capable of' being princi- 
pal, and as valuable a member of society, as the scarcely 
better educated male principal, who receives three and 
four times her salary. 

It is perhaps in conformity with this theory that the 
circular of Smith College, founded by a woman for wom- 
en, presents us a long list of teachers, every man of whom 
is dignified with the title of "professor," while every 
woman of them is only a " teacher." ' Or, by a sort of 
unconscious cerebration it may be the escape of a 
deeper truth that the men only " profess " to teach 
while the women do the real teaching ! 

That well-beloved teacher and citizen, as honored as 
he was honorable, the late S. M. Capron, of whom I 
have spoken before, understood and practised the prin- 
ciple of courtesy, — understopd it rather through his 
generous instincts and noble heart than by any intellect- 

27* 



3i8 The Deg7'adation of the Teacher. 

ual process, and practised it, no doubt, unconsciously; 
and he secured the utmost harmony and efficiency 
in his school, together with an affection that was only 
not adoration. One of his teachers says of him in a 
little private memorial : " He multiplied himself through 
his teachers ; if he had been less to them, he could not 
have been so much to the school. So deep was his 
impress upon their own minds, and so durable his 
moulding force upon the conditions under which they 
worked, that those who served under him cannot even 
now separate that part of their success which is fairly 
their own from that part which had its source in him. 
. . . His successes were all genuine. We believed in 
him, because in his province, he was the ablest man we 
knew. We deferred to him, because he was wiser than 
us all. We loved him for a goodness that was above 
this world. ... By him, alone of all men, it was pleas- 
ant to every one to be surpassed. . . . This breadth of 
scholarship enabled him to give help and sympathy : 
it never tempted him to domineer and annoy. The air 
is not so free as he left his assistants in that which was 
their province. Thus unfettered, they were doubly 
bound : faith and honor were engaged that they would 
do their best. . . . However the principal of a school 
may possess the confidence of his subordinates, it would 
seem to be in the nature of things, that there should be 
sometimes a conflict of opinions, a deliberate sacrifice 



The Degradation of the Teacher. 319 

of private conviction to authority. Mr. Capron, how- 
ever, was an example to the contrary. In yielding to 
him, there was no conscious submission. His way rec- 
ommended itself as the best : his opinion had only to be 
stated in order to be shared. The deference which he 
commanded in meetings of the faculty might have been 
called servile, if it had not been so affectionate. He 
always invited free discussion, claimed but one vote, 
and yielded without contest, when the day went against 
him ; but his doing so was an occasion of consternation 
to the rest, so apt was it to be followed by disaster. 
An almost unanimous vote would sometimes be recon- 
sidered and reversed, in consequence of a decided opin- 
ion from him. ... 'I don't agree with Mr. Capron on 
this point,' said a teacher, himself mighty in counsel, 
' but I hope he will settle the matter in accordance with 
his own judgment ; for experience has taught me that, 
when I differ from him, I am sure to be in the wrong.' 
. . . His greatness of spirit was contagious. Where he 
was, harmony was a habit ; magnanimity became a 
fashion. Among so many teachers, succeeding each 
other through so many years, not all could have been by 
nature noble; but most found grace to become or to 
appear so. In his generous presence, small jealousies, 
little rancor, could not live." 

We have no standard by which to measure the influ- 
ence of such a man. 



320 The Degradation of the Teacher, 

When we have such teachers, the best we can do in 
our children's interest is to let them alone. .If we have 
not such teachers, let us come as near it as possible ; but 
let all our efforts be directed to putting good material 
into our schools, and not to patching up poor material. 
No amount of machinery, no interference of outside 
authority, can help a poor teacher, or do anything but 
hinder a good one. Of one of the best public schools 
that ever came into the range of my vision, the com- 
mittee is like clay in the hands of the potter. They do 
everything that the teachers tell them to do, and noth- 
ing that the teachers tell them not to do ; and there is 
no unsoundness in them. Big and broad-shouldered, 
they bear every burden that is laid upon them, without 
the smallest attempt at revolt. Good-natured, great- 
hearted and largely wise, though unversed in the mere 
technics of school, their counsel is often sought, and 
always welcome. Not unfrequently a sudden ray of 
simple business-sense, cast by them almost at random, 
will flash illumination upon a knotty problem which 
has long baffled the teachers. But whether or no they 
have any immediate errand, or any light to throw upon 
a vexed question, their faces are always welcome : 
their mere presence is comfort and encouragement and 
good cheer. But it must be said, too, that, in this 
school, the teachers are almost without exception, the 
gentle and cultured offspring of gentle and cultured 



The Degradation of the Teacher. 321 

families, — ladies and gentlemen, who, not only in 
scholarship and professional accomplishments, but in 
manners, attitude, and conversation, and all social 
graces, are worthy of being accepted as models by the 
children whom they teach. With such teachers and 
such committee, it would be very difficult to make 
trouble in the schools, or to wean the descendants of 
Puritan and Pilgrim from their devotion to the idea of 
education as the safeguard of the republic. 

It fell to my lot to be reared in a community, from 
which the traditions of great teachers have not yet 
departed. Mary Lyon, Miss Yeaton, Miss Grant, Mrs. 
Cowles, — their names are still a power to conjure by, 
though all but one have gone over to the majority ; and 
that one, resting from her labors in the serene evening 
of her brilliant life, is still bright enough and strong 
enough to chase a thousand School Boards, and two like 
her would put ten thousand to flight. I never heard that 
these women borrowed leave to be; from any school 
superintendents or school supervisors, or ever plotted 
to have their work considered a profession, or ever 
trotted across country to get a convention or a com- 
mittee to make rules for them or to tell them when they 
might stay away from school. They sat at desks every 
one Hke a queen on her throne, and said to one man 
go and he went, and to another man come and he came, 
and to a third do this and he did it, minister or mer- 



323 The Degradation of the Teacher, 

chant, doctor or deacon, and honored himself in the 
doing. They not only ruled over the pupils under 
their charge ; but by their moral vigor, their intellectual 
power, and their spiritual supremacy, their influence 
penetrated through the very framework of society and 
left its mark on all the region round about. When they 
counselled, it was in quiet country homes as if one had 
enquired of the oracle of God, and when they honored 
the parsonage or the farmhouse with a visit it was the 
entertainment of angels not unaware. Near enough to 
them to know the grandeur and nobility (5f their lives, 
as well as the high esteem of men in which they were 
held, I learned to reverence the profession of the 
teacher ; and all the combined and continuous efforts 
of our public school-system to vulgarize and degrade 
the work have never been able to make me unlearn that 
lesson. 



FOR SUBSTANCE OF 
DOCTRINE. 



FOR SUBSTANCE OF DOCTRINE. 

IT is to the credit of our people that they expend 
their money so freely for the education of their chil- 
dren ; but lavish expenditure is not the sole sign or 
channel of wisdom. The education of the young re- 
public is not a luxury to be cut off when times are hard : 
but the educational fund is the conscience-money of the 
people, saved out of hard earnings for a high purpose ; 
and it should be at all times administered with the 
most upright and intelligent economy. Have the 
enormously-increased expenditures of late years been 
attended by a corresponding increase in the quality of 
education and character ? For it cannot be too often 
repeated that no amount of excellence in the machin- 
ery is any substitute for excellence of results. The 
tools are of value only for the work they do. 

Our schoolhouses have not been more really or rap- 
idly improved than our dwelling-houses, which have 
been left solely to private enterprise. Our public schools 
have certainly no more than kept pace with our private 
schools, which have received neither help nor hin- 
drance from the state. There was a time when the 

^ . (32s) 



326 Por Substance of Doct7'ine. 

district met, selected its own prudential committee, dis- 
cussed its own affairs, decided upon its own measures. 
The minister was generally one of the committee. A 
large number of the best men of the district attended 
these meetings, joined the committee in visiting the 
schools at the beginning and end of every term, and 
knew, almost from week to week, what was going on in 
the "district." Nobody was paid. It was an honor- 
ary and patriotic service ; and I think I venture on no 
disputed ground when I say that it was well done. 
But we have changed all that ; and I cannot see that 
the change is for the better. Certainly the fathers do 
not, in the country districts, visit the schools as they 
used to do. The committee dinners have fallen off, 
which may partially account for, but may also result 
from, lack of interest. The clergyman is counted out ; 
and the paid committees have everything pretty much 
their own way. I do not say that it is a bad way ; but 
it is not so good as the old way. It is not so good in 
this, that the schools are not so set in the heart of the 
community as they used to be. The children are not so 
near the parents. They are let out by contract as it 
were to the teacher and committee, and are no longer 
the constant and tender care of the community of 
whom they are the chief charm and charge. Superin- 
tendence has passed away from those whose interest 
had the keenness of personal acquaintance, relation- 



For Substance of Doctrine. 327 

ship, and responsibility, into the hands of a paid and 
professional officer. The result does not show pupils 
more apt, more eager, more docile, more industrious, 
more persistent. 

We consider it good economy to select low-pricer' 
teachers and eke out their defects by establishing 
schools to train them and by setting overseers to 
watch them. We turn a caravan of children without 
regard to age, sex, or previous condition of servitude 
or society, into a caravansera of brick perched upon 
an arid grind of gravel, and then call upon all the 
world to stand off, and admire our system. Six hun- 
dred or a thousand children are put into one house, to 
be taught by a band of women who are not required 
to be well educated, who are seldom heard of, and 
whose wages scarcely average more than those of a 
first-class cook in a private family. They are superin- 
tended by a "head," who is not required to be better 
taught than they, who gets the greater part of the sal- 
ary, the credit, and renown, and who is himself super- 
intended by a superintendent of schools who enjoys 
such education as it has pleased Heaven to endow him 
withal, and who is himself superintended by a body of 
men called a committee. Yet with responsibility di- 
vided, and credit misplaced, and adequate preparation 
nothing accounted of, a vast amount of difficult and 
excellent work is done. 



328 Por Substance of Doctrine, 

But why persist in working at a disadvantage if we 
can far more easily and profitably work to advantage ? 
Why give all our thoughts to amending and none at all 
to the advisability of reconstructing ? We are rushing 
headlong with our " system " as confidently as if it had 
been transmitted to us from Mount Sinai on tables of 
stone. Accommodation of the masses is getting to 
mean accommodation in the mass. But is it possible that 
there is no other, no better, way of disposing of our 
children, than to build huge structures, story above 
story, and then fill them to the brim with boys and 
girls? I confess I look upon these unwieldy receptacles 
not with pride but with dismay. They are evidences 
of poverty not of wealth. They seem devised of set 
purpose to turn our children, by their inevitable work- 
ing, into machines, not into citizens of independence 
and self-direction. Their cumbrousness and their 
costliness are equally appalling. But not content 
with our own calamities, we are striving to entail 
disaster. 

'' The schoolhouses in Germany are as much better 
than we have as can be imagined," says a distinguished 
school-manager, after having descanted upon the excel- 
lence of Boston schoolhouses ; "and, when built, they 
will last two thousand years ;" which is the very worst 
thing to be known about a schoolhouse. Why, in the 
world, in this world at least, should any one want a 



For Substance of Doctrine. 3129 

schoolhouse to last tv;o thousand 3iears ? What an imper- 
tinence to saddle sixty generations with our crudeness 
and our ignorance ! We have been building stone hos- 
pitals for the future ; and, when the top stone was laid, 
we discovered that the best kind of hospital is the 
fragile structure of boards, built to be taken down at the 
end. of three years. Whoever has entered one of our 
magnificent schoolhouses during school hours, and has 
been smitten by the sudden change from the pure out- 
door air to the foul and noisome atmosphere of the 
schoolrooms, can but shudder at the thought of satu- 
rating that brick and wood with the fetid exhalations 
of two thousand years and turning the little children 
into it all the while. When to this we add the danger 
from defective flues and pillars, the weary climbing 
of teachers and girls, and little children, up the long 
flights of stairs, the noise necessarily attendant upon 
so large a gathering of children, the constraint and 
the machinery indispensable to prevent confusion, but 
otherwise utterly useless, utterly foreign to the individ- 
ual growth, I think it will be admitted that the next 
advance will be, not in the direction of more costly, 
more spacious, or more durable buildings, but of more 
cheerful, more accessible, and more humane ones. We 
shall leave our goods to be stored in sky-lqfts, but 
shall keep our children on the earth as long as possible. 
I should be glad, this day, to see every educational 
28* 



330 For Substance of Doctrine. 

" pile " given over to men and merchandise, and our 
school-children housed in pleasant little cheap wooden 
structures, not above two stories high at most, with 
honest green turf, and. honest brown mould, in the 
yards, and honest clean sand in the corner if you like, 
and not a forlorn waste of bricks and gravel ; with no 
more pupils than two or three women ean easily and 
thoroughly teach ; with snugness and comfort reigning, 
and individuality not imperatively ruled out. I would 
have the schoolhouses so cheaply built, that each gen- 
eration could afford to carry out its own ideas. The 
people's money should not be locked up in brick and 
stone, to stand for generations, the brazen monuments 
of our perhaps guiltless, but none the less burdensome 
ignorance, a stumbling-block in the way of progress. 
Building-funds should rather buy land, that the fresh 
little lungs may be swept through and through with 
fresh air, that even the city children shall have room 
enough to play and be shaded and sunned and cared 
for in their play, and not broil on a crunching gravel 
waste, or bake against a brick wall, or shrivel in a piti- 
less unbroken wind. So a school shall be a nursery of 
health, as well as of intelligence, a source of vigor to 
body and to mind. Nor should these schools be run by 
machinery, like a Waltham watch-factory, — the greater 
the number, the greater the efficiency, and every piece 
alike. They should be treated as human beings, each 



Por Substance of Doch'ine. 331 

individual soul run in a different mould, and needing 
prompt and peculiar carei There should be so few 
pupils in the mass, that every one should be within the 
teacher's range ; and mind, heart, and body alike, be the 
object of skilful and intelligent training and care and 
love. 

The duties of teachers and the salaries of teachers 
should approximate, and responsibility should easily 
be traced and known. There should be no male prin- 
cipal at the distant, not to say inaccessible summit of 
a mountain-chain of teachers, Vith a salary thrice and 
four times that of the female subordinates, under the 
mistaken idea that only a man can organize and 
administer. Organization should take its proper place 
in the rear, and teaching should take its proper place 
at the front ; and he who can best teach — that is, he 
who can best stimulate and guide the infant mind and 
heart — shall be chosen teacher, and shall have an 
adequate and honorable salary, whether he be man or 
woman. As economy is to be consulted, we will con- 
sult it, not by reducing the salaries of teachers, the 
persons who do the indispensable work, and concern- 
ing whose character and fitness we cannot be too 
exacting, but by cutting off at one fel-l swoop the 
unnecessary stepping-stones, not to say stumbling- 
blocks, between the community and the teachers. 
State Boards should be summarily splintered ; and our 



332 Por Substance of Doctrine. 

• 

lately-invented superintendent of schools would escape 
annihilation only by the skin of his teeth. In our re- 
constructed system, when the principal is simply the 
head of a few classes, a practical and active teacher, 
and when the schools are many, a school-superintendent 
may be very convenient as errand-boy ; that is, to do the 
outside work which is necessary but mechanical, and 
foreign to the real work of teaching. But he should 
be only a convenience, elected by the district that wants 
him and for as long a time as it wants him ; and if the 
district be large and populous, he may be a useful and 
busy person. Ordinarily, however, the very best school- 
superintendents are the fathers and mothers, the uncles, 
aunts, grandmothers, and older brothers and sisters of 
the pupils. Give us good teachers and small schools, 
and let all this costly paraphernalia go, as tending to 
distraction rather than to education. 

If this be not possible, if we must go on with our 
wholesale machine-made schooling, under which, per- 
haps, 

"Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, . . . 

And the individual withers, 

And the world is more and more," 

let US at least not boast of it. It is the best we can 
do. We have not time nor mind to give our children 
what they need : we give what we can afford. But let 
us have a very present consciousness that it is a poor 



For Substance of Doctrine. 333 

giving, a great improvement on nothing, but very far 
short of the ideal of a nation which believes that its first 
duty and its most sacred charge are the rearing of its 
children. 

A few wise men would, doubtless, theorize a far more 
logical and symmetrical path for our village life than the 
one in which we stumble along : but we are far stronger 
men and women for tracking and following our own path. 
We may concede, what is by no means proven, that a 
State Board can give us a more elegantly-constructed 
school system than we can build for ourselves : and it 
would yet be true that it is better for the people to man- 
age their own schools. We are in the most healthy con- 
dition when every parent, and I may say every adult, 
feels a personal interest in, and responsibility for, the 
well-being of the schools, and not when we feel that 
some Board, or appointee, or any official whatever whom 
we but remotely touch is doing the work for which we 
are in no wise an"^werable. We are apt to forget that 
what we aim at in mechanical processes is precisely the 
opposite of what we should aim at in mental processes. 
Hence the delusion and the snare by which we are 
beguiled. All that we want in a row of pins is uni- 
formity and perfection : what we want in a row of chil- 
dren is the perfection of individuality. A well ordered 
machine can dispose of the pins ; but children cannot 
be trained up in the gross. Each child is as isolated a 



334 ^o^ Substance of Doctrine. 

fact as if he were the only child in the world; and the 
object of all education is to make out of every child 
the best man, woman, citizen, that he is capable of 
becoming. 

Nor can this ever be done by generalizations, how- 
ever lofty, but only by hard, definite work. When a 
high authority desires "to remind educators, as they 
begin a new year of work, that their business is ... to 
find out first the highest ideal capacity for manhood 
and womanhood in each of them, and then help them 
to realize it," what, exactly, has it in view ? 

Just down the hill, I see the tower of a neat little 
schoolhouse, where the educator is a young woman, ed- 
ucating at a salary of thirty dollars a month. She has 
thirty pupils, let us say, and probably hears as many 
as twenty-five classes recite every day. Her pupils 
range from the pretty timid little four-year-old, half 
homesick for her mother's lap as she lisps out her 
lovely broken letters, to the stalwart boy of fourteen in 
a hand-to-hand fight with vulgar fractions and partial 
payments. They troop by, to and from school, laugh- 
ing, chattering, pushing each other off the sidewalk, 
pelting each other, which I do not care for, but pelting 
also my few Roxbury russets which the canker 
worms disdained, — a merry, frank, careless crew, who 
will nevertheless grow up into sedate and sober citi- 
zens. I have movings of benevolence towards them ; 



For Substance of Doctrine. 335 

and how can I better gratify my kindly impulses than 
by turning to their teacher (I beg her pardon, educa- 
tor) , and reminding her what her business really is ? It 
is true that her business may possibly be none of mine. 
She has been educating some half-dozen, perhaps a 
dozen years, and might be supposed to know what she 
is about. At any rate, personal observation, study, and 
experiment are better than any theorizing; and a wo- 
man who cannot learn from years of experience may 
safely be counted on for not learning from any outside 
suggestion. None the less for that will I sit tranquilly 
at my desk, and, as her wild horde comes thronging in, 
I will suggest — what? Simply this, that she "first find 
out the highest ideal capacity for manhood and woman- 
hood in each of them, and then help them to develop 
and realize it." Easy things to understand ! 

Unless she turns upon me, and asks me how to do it ; 
in which case I am lost. What is the highest ideal 
capacity for manhood and womanhood in the children, 
which she is to discover? I do not know, unless it 
means that she is to discover exactly how great a man 
each boy can become, and how great a woman each 
girl is to grow into. The world has generally supposed 
that the only way to discover this was to wait and see. 

Nothing short of omniscience is considered equal to 
the task of forecasting the man from the boy, the 
woman from the girl ; and omniscience we have never, 



33^ . For Substance of Doctrine, 

in this school-district, been able to engage as educator 
at thirty dollars a month. Nor do I believe that the 
cities — which pay their young women munificently 
(from two hundred to six or eight hundred a year), and 
which do not count inability to enter the high school as 
a disqualification for teaching in the grammar school^ 
— have been more successful. For the ordinary young 
woman, whose progress towards omniscience has barely 
taken her past the milestones of Greenleafs Arithmetic 
and Guyot's Geography, few things can be more dis- 
heartening than to be told at the starting-point that her 
first problem is to cipher out the unknown and the 
unknowable. No doubt they assemble overall the land 
on the first Monday of September, educators experi- 
enced and inexperienced, rested, fresh, — I will not 
insult them, and stultify myself by saying, eager and 
enthusiastic for their work. On the contrary, I doubt 
not they turn longing looks to the green fields and blue 
waters, the freedom and frolic they have left, and the 
schoolroom seems to them humdrum, and life too tire- 
some, and it is Blue Monday everywhere. But courage, 
comrades ! You have fidelity which is better than eag- 
erness, and resolution which outwears enthusiasm ; and 
in a few days you settle down to work, and the sweet- 
ness of lost leisure remains only to strengthen you for 
the future and not to discontent you with the present. 
You enter your schoolrooms — or does the new dialect 



For Substance of Doctrine. 337 

prescribe education-rooms ? — ready to work and wait, 
to guide, control, and help, prepared' to hear recita-' 
tions, and examine answers, and record progress, and 
repress mischief. But to " find out the highest ideal 
capacity for manhood and womanhood " in each of 
3^our thirty or three hundred pupils, — this you have not 
bargained for. 

Courage again, comrades ! We writers, we have not 
the least idea what we are talking about. We speak 
great swelling words, because the sound of them pleases 
our ears. We stand sometimes, even in the pulpit, and 
reason of faith and works and justification and sanctifi- 
cation, without evolving or recognizing one practical, 
vital truth or idea, simply because, to some minds, these 
words did and do mean ideas, and they uttered 
them with a force that arrested attention and influenced 
life. So the words sound good to lis, and soothe us, 
and by that token, perhaps, benefit us ; but of simple 
and direct meaning, as- bargain-words and business- 
words have meaning, they are void. So we gratify our 
inborn patriotism and virtue by fusilading our public 
men with fine general maxims on the grandeur of 
nobility and versatility and incorruptibility, \\hich are 
worth no more for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, 
for instruction in righteousness, than the paper they are 
written on. Likewise, do not be dismayed because we 
express our friendly designs towards the rising genera- 
-9 



338 For Substance of Doctrine, 

tion in high heroics to you. If I might speak a word, 
when, I grant, a41 speech is impertinent, I would quietly 
say, never mind the liighest ideal capacities. We know 
nothing about it, and cannot by searching find it out, — 
not you, nor I, nor Launcelot, nor any other. The only 
way to discover what a boy will be is to make him into 
it. The only way to do that is by doing the thing which 
lies nearest to hand. Your business is to make the boys 
and girls learn their arithmetic lesson and their gram. 
mar lesson and their geography lesson from books, or 
boards, or blocks, according to your own taste or skill 
if supernumeraries will but let you alone ; to make your 
pupils know that they know it, and are not simply willing 
to run the risk of being discovered in not knowing it ; to 
make them thoroughly understand the difference between 
knowing a lesson, and knowing something about it ; to 
make them hate lying and stealing and swearing and 
rudeness and vulgarity, if you can, and, if faults of birth 
and breeding render this impossible, then to make them 
afraid to lie and swear and steal and misbehave. Let 
the boy's highest ideal capacity take care of itself, but 
charge yourself with knowing of a surety whether he 
has worked his example in arithmetic out of his own 
brain, or whether he has copied the answer from a key, 
or the process from his seatmate's slate. If you cannot 
ascertain this by your own inward light, without recourse 
to testimony, you will make but a poor hand at ideal 



For Substance of Doctrbie. 339 

capacity. If you can make a girl reluctant to ask as- 
sistance, exultant at conquering her own difficulties, dis- 
dainful of deception, and self-denying enough to repel 
and reject the dreadful school-slang, you are as near 
the direct road to her highest ideal capacity as if you 
lived laborious days in trying to evolve some indefinite, 
sonorous abstraction. 

A girl ought to be taught her geography and arith- 
metic in so thorough, commanding and conscientious 
fashion that it shall stand her in good stead whenever 
she sweeps the stairs and lead her to sweep out the 
cornei-s, and when she dusts the table to dust under the 
books, and when she sews to sew finely and firmly or 
coarsely and slightly according as the task demands. 
A boy should be taught so to master his lessons as 
to form in him the habit of being on time for all his 
life long, and make him hold his occupations stanchly 
in hand and always to keep his word. Children can 
learn very little science in their short school life but the 
one thing they should learn is mastery. 

School, we are often told, should be made as much like 
home as possible. Not at all. Not in the least. Not 
even like the ideal home. Still less like the thousands 
of homes from which the children actually come. 
School is a half-way house between home and the re- 
lentless, self-seeking world. School is the border land 
between dependence and subjection on the one side 



340 Fof Substance of Doctrine. 

and independence and self-direction on the other. Of 
the two, school is more like a little world than 
a great home. Its type is society rather than family. 
The child does not go suddenly from the special care 
and guidance of two grown persons, of whom he is the 
dearest object in life, into the great pushing world that 
cares for him not at all. He goes into a modified 
world — into a community indeed that has no regard for 
him but under the care and control of a person who, 
without special love, is still hired to take special yet 
common care of him. Parental weakness may often 
have worked disastrously to the child's development. 
It is for the school to supply that defect — to be strong 
where the mother was weak, to be firm where the 
father faltered, to be just where parental control 
was partial, to be calm where it was turbulent, 
equable where it was uncertain, tender where it was 
stern, encouraging where it was repressive, symmetrical 
where it was unsightly, supplementary where it was 
judicious. The father and mother ought to be on each 
side of the child, a wall of beneficent, inexorable law, 
until he shall learn to be a law unto himself. But too 
often they fall flat whenever the little child lurches up 
against them. It is for the teacher to continue this 
support if it be begun ; to fashion it with just, gentle, 
and most skilful effort, if the proper work have failed 
the proper hands. So, from the tenderness of an over- 



For Substa7ice of Doctrine. 341 

soft and from the depression of an over-harsh home 
the little citizen shall presently and pleasantly spring 
up into erectness, strength, solidity, self-reliance, 
self-poise. It is not any outside " system " which can 
do this. It is the teacl]er. The school is not the super- 
visors, superintendents, boards, journals of education, 
teachers' conventions, forms of blanks, yearly reports. 
The teacher is the school. 

*' The Harvard examinations for women," says one 
of our astute public philosophers, who would cast away 
both net and drag in politics trusting that fish will come 
in through pure moral suasion, but who in school-matters 
are ever ready to sacrifice unto the net and burn incense 
to the drags as the only gods, " The Harvard examina- 
tions for women, conducted in New York by Professor 
Childs, have just closed. The New York Tribime looks 
forward to the day when Harvard shall provide for those 
women intending to become teachers a regular course 
* administered by professors who shall have both learn- 
ing and special genius for such work.' " 

I know a girl who took the Harvard examinations. 
She was barely seventeen. She had never been to school 
regularly in her life. She had gone a little here and a 
little there and had stayed at home a great deal. She 
had picked up a little Latin and a little French and a 
little mathematics — painful as it is to say it but I can't 
tell a lie — from her sisters and her cousins and her aunts. 
29* 



342 Por Suhstajice of Doctrine. 

She had romped over the hills and had grown like a 
wild olive tree till the women of her family became a- 
larmed and went out into the barn to ask her father 
what should be done with her. The autocrat of all the 
Russias listened to their statement — with ill-concealed 
impatience, I should say, except that he belongs to a 
race which never lets concealment of its impatience 
like a worm i' the bud feed on its damask ^cheek — es- 
pecially in the bosom of its own family — and then thun- 
dered down from the hay-mow his imperial ukase ''let 
her tramp." So she tramped as aforetime, deviating 
into a schoolhouse occasionally as the spirit moved her, 
till it suddenly occurred to her sorrowing female relatives 
that it would be a good thing for her to take the Har- 
vard examinations and see whether she really knew 
anything or not. As it struck my lady's fancy favorably, 
she took the "preliminaries," which I am told are con- 
sidered to be as nearly equal to the Freshmen and 
Sophomore years as the female mind is able to approach 
the male mind ; and having quietly cleared away some 
obscurities in the statement of the problems presented 
to her, she stood in 

Algebra 95. 

Arithmetic 96. 

English Literature and Composition . 70.6 

Latin 77.5 

Geometry 66. 



Por Substance of Doctritic. 343 

It seems to me that some inference is fairly deduci- 
ble from this tabulation, but I confess I do not exactly 
know what it is. I do know that my wise and blessed 
damosel was as free of our school system as Gideon's 
fleece of water when there was dew on all the ground. 

Why should we look forward to the day when Har- 
vard shall provide for women intending to become 
teachers a regular course ? What claim has Harvard to 
be a teacher of teachers ? Is her success with young 
men so brilliant and exceptional as to create a pre- 
sumption that she would infuse fresh intellectual and 
moral life into our young women ? Within the past year 
such paragraphs as the following have been passing 
around the country uncontradicted : 

The only circumstance which marred Commencement Day 
at Harvard College was the drunkenness which followed the 
class reunions in the afternoon. This evil is naturally con- 
fined more to the younger classes. 

And what the canker-worm of one paper left, the 
caterpillar of another hath eaten : 

We learn from a gentleman residing in Cambridge, that 
the closing scene on Commencement night at Harvard Col- 
lege was a disgrace to all concerned. Many of the graduates 
as well as some of the other students were drunk, and the 
drinking on the campus was open and unconcealed. 

The one paragraph attributes drunkenness to the 
younger classes, the other spreads it among the gradu- 



344 ^^'^ Substance of Dcctri7te. 

ates ; between them we have Harvard College reeling 
to and fro. New England professed to be shocked 
awhile ago because two or three Senators appeared, 
inebriated, on the floor of the Senate. Why should 
she be shocked ? What does she expect ? If she grad- 
uate drunkards from her institutions of learning, if 
she make drunkards in her colleges, is it not the 
height of hypocrisy for her to pretend to be scandal- 
ized because they occasionally, in after life, stagger out 
into the daylight? When, in a deliberative assembly 
of American citizens, a man or two, under the excite- 
ment and fatigue of days and nights of continuous ses- 
sions, resorts to intoxicating stimulants and presents 
himself to his peers and the public as something less 
than a man — it is indeed lamentable. But when young 
men, in the fore-front of our civilization, in the first 
flower and freshness of their manhood, signalize their 
entrance into responsible and self-directing life by 
flocking and falling into degrading, sottish sensuality, 
it is "horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told." 

Have the professors of Elmira and Vassar and 
Wellesley ever sent their girl-graduates reeling on the 
campus, that they should sit at the feet of Harvard to 
learn how to teach ? . 

The same paper that looks to Harvard for the rising 
of woman's Star in the East says : 



Fo7' Substa7tce of Doctrine. 345 

The world moves slowly; men have apparently not yet 
quite realized the use of brains. It speaks ill for the culture 
of the time and of the country that the paragraphs of intelli- 
gence from all our largest universities show twenty sentences 
concerningathletics to one sentence referring to mental instruc- 
tion. Feet and hands outweigh the head still as in barbarous 
times. 

Is this again a reason why the " mental instruction " 
of young women who are to be teachers should be in- 
trusted to Harvard ? Shall the last final touch of science 
be given to young women by their own schools, or shall it 
be transferred to the schools that celebrate their gradua- 
tion with drunken orgies and float one flag for learning 
and nineteen flags for rowing — pronounced as you 
please? 

Again, the same paper remarks that " a party of thir- 
ty Harvard students had been visiting a brewery recent- 
ly, and was given a collation by the proprietor. " " One 
hundred and fifty students are said to have visited the 
' Black Crook ' at its first appearance at the Globe 
Theatre last week, occupying the front seats and making 
the audience familiar with their ' rah ! rah ! rah ! ' We 
should not suggest these two places as the best helps to 
young men who are fitting to be leaders in the intellect- 
ual and moral questions of the day." 

Why then suggest that the professors, who send their 
students a hundred and fifty strong to the Black Crook 



34^ Por S7ihsia7icc of Doctriuc. 

and thirty strong to the brewery, should have the train- 
ing also of our women teachers? Would it mend the 
matter to have thirty girls go out of their schoolrooms 
to drink beer beside the under -graduates, or would the 
" rah ! rah ! rah !" sound sweeter from the lips of one 
hundred and fifty young ladies, who had flocked from 
their " regular course " room at Harvard to pursue their 
studies of- the Black Crook? 

Nevertheless, it. is right to be taught by an enemy 
or by a very defective friend. I have little love for 
Harvard College, little admiration for its government, 
little respect for its work, great scorn for some of its 
methods. Yet the last and best word on education has 
been spoken by the president of Harvard College, — 
all the more significant that it was no formal and pre- 
pared statement ; seems indeed, to have been unappre- 
ciated by the president himself, — to have coruscated 
from him, as it were, in a spasm of illumination, which 
he is half inclined to deny ; for he says of it subse- 
quently, when adversely questioned, that it was "inci- 
dental ; and I am quite willing that it should go for 
what it was momentarily worth." 

There spake the man relapsed into himself. 

Thus spake the man under the divine afflatus : 

"I may as well abruptly avow, as the result of my 
reading and observation in the matter of education, 
that I recognize but one mental acquisition as an es- 



For Substance of Doctrine. ^^J 

sential part of the education of a lady or gentleman^- 
namely, an accurate and refined use of the mother 
tongue. Greek, Latin, French, German, mathematics, 
natural and physical science, metaphysics, history and 
aesthetics, are all profitable and delightful, both as train- 
ing and as acquisitions, to him who studies them with 
intelligence and love ; but not one of them has the 
least claim to be called an acquisition essential to a lib- 
eral education or an essential part of a sound training." 

I shall watch President Eliot from this time forth. 
There is no telling what revelations may not come to a 
man who has had even a "momentary " glimpse of so 
profound and hidden a truth ; and though the lightning 
may not strike him a second time, there is always an 
interest attaching to a man who has survived one flash ! 

Nothing so marks the truth of his words as the in- 
credulity with which they were received; 

"Will President Eliot offer the public some fuller 
explanation of his meaning ?" was asked by some of 
our best and wisest men ; but that was what President 
Eliot could not do. He tried, but he did not succeed. 
He talked about salt and oatmeal, but to no purpose. 
His words were not susceptible of explanation. They 
were already as simple and succinct as words can be. 
If a man does not understand them, it is solely because 
he is not sufficiently educated, because he has not that 
one mental acquisition which is the only essential part 



34^ F'or Substance of Doctrine, 

of education, — an accurate and refined use of the 
mother tongue. He does not understand the meaning 
and use of words. His interlocutors professed them- 
selves satisfied, and said he must have been, at least 
partially, misreported — which only proves the more, 
how utterly they failed to comprehend him ; for the 
word reported was the true word, and if it were mis- 
reported, then the misreporter was a greater prophet 
than the president. 

"What training to the powers of observation is given 
by the study of the mother tongue ? What training to 
the art faculties ? What to the knowledge of abstract 
truths? What to the faculties which deal with abstract 
truths? What to the power of reasoning? Does pres- 
ident Eliot mean that an acquaintance with the mother 
tongue trains every faculty which is trained by mathe- 
matics, science, metaphysics and aesthetics ? Or does he 
mean that the training of these faculties is not essen- 
tial to a good education, that education may be partial 
and yet adequate ?" 

So questioned the puzzled but ''educated " men, and 
showed by that token that they were not educated — that 
they lacked the one mental acquisition essential to edu- 
cation, an accurate and refined knowledge of words. 
President Eliot said nothing whatever about the study 
of the mother tongue. But educated men are so little 
educated that they not only do not use words accu- 



For Substance of Doctrine. 349 

rately, but they do not understand words accurately 
used. 

Next to parents, in partnership with parents, the 
future of the republic lies in the hands of teachers. 
Human nature here is exactly the same as it is in other 
countries. The human heart is open to the same influ- 
ences, the human mind is governed by the same laws, 
the human body is subject to the same limitations. The 
only thing in which we differ from the old world, the 
only thing which makes this republic an experiment, 
w^e cannot too often repeat, is self-government. It is 
but a century or two since the idea seems to have 
dawned upon the nations that a-sovereign existed for his 
people, not the people for the sovereign. We are simply 
trying the experiment whether a people cannot be its own 
sovereign. But with individual responsibility must come 
individual development to make the experiment success- 
ful. We wish to reduce government to its lowest possible 
terms, to raise the individual to his highest possible 
power. The American idea is to have the State do as little 
as possible for the individual, the individual do as much 
as possible for himself. The very act of helping him- 
self strengthens his ability to help himself. Those men 
and women who are laboring for organization, for sys- 
tem, for uniformity ; laboring to put schools and trades 
and professions into the hands of the State, are laboring 
for the idea of the old kingdoms and against the idea 



350 , For Substance of Doctrine. 

of the new republic. Yet our educational writers seem 
largely to have forgotten or never to have accepted this 
fact. They lament that " we are far from having ad- 
ministrative unity in our cultural organism," not remem- 
bering that individual activity is a thousand times 
better for the education of citizens than administrative 
unity. They pronounce that " Germany has taken, in 
its cultural organism, the only correct course by labor- 
ing profoundly in each and all its branches," and in the 
selfsame paragraph assert that " there is nowhere so 
little depth of individuality as in Germany " — not see- 
ing that that course cannot be correct which trenches 
upon the individual. They would enforce upon us the 
pedagogic books of Austria as the master- work of 
master-minds and do not heed that Austria with all her 
masterful system has just forbidden all evangelical 
work ; has notified the missionaries of the American 
Board that no religious meetings of any kind can be 
held, that no native Austrian must even be within 
hearing of Protestant family worship, and that any in- 
fraction of the law is to be punished with imprisonment. 
Must we copy closely a system which rears citizens who 
will permit themselves to be thus domineered ? 

They quote enthusiastically a foreign professor's re- 
joicing that, "the real people's school is now a state 
institution, where reading, writing, arithmetic, with reli- 
gion, are taught" — and, apparently, do not see that 



For Substance of Doctrifte. 351 

the triumph consists in having taken education out of 
the hands of kings, princes and priests and put it in- 
to the hands of the State ; not in having it taken out 
of the hands of the people and put into the hands of 
the State. To withdraw education from the power of the 
anointed few, the rich and the noble, and to put reading 
and arithmetic into the hands of the many at the ex- 
pense of the State, are very like what we have done our- 
selves. To take the arts and trades and sciences out 
of the hands of the people and put them into the 
hands of the State is for us to trace a backward path, 
while even the old monarchies are following in ours. 

"Public teachers are now public officers, which is 
a great improvement upon the old way when the only 
cultivated teacher was the priest, and the school be- 
came a dependency of the church;" but it is not an 
improvement upon the new way of having the public 
teacher the officer of the community that employs him, 
and not of the State Government. It is better that the 
teacher should be an officer of the State than of the 
Church, but it is better that he should be an officer of 
the district than of the State. 

What the State should do is to provide for the safety 
of the republic ; to provide for all opportunity to ac- 
quire the education which it demands from all. Beyond 
this it seems unquestionably best to leave everything to 
individual self-direction. Kindergartens, professional 



352 For Suhstattce of Doctrine* 

universities, trades-schools, cooking-schools, may safely 
be left to the people. Where they are wanted they 
will spring up. Where the need and the demand are 
greater than the ability to supply, the State may con- 
sider whether it shall not nourish and strengthen with 
judicious aid until the necessity depart, or the young 
institution be strong enough to stand without sup- 
port. Thus flexible to the wants of the people, spring- 
ing from the people, under their control, changing 
with their intelligence, open to all experiment, but on 
so small a scale that failure is not fatal, our school sys- 
tem should be a vital and vitalizing organism, not a 
clumsy, unsightly scafl"olding. 

No harm is done even if our schools do not keep 
step to the music of union. No harm is done if one 
teacher teaches . arithmetic from a book, and another 
teaches it without a book, and another teaches it both 
with and without, provided only arithmetic be 
taught. It is safer to trust the natural rivalry of inde- 
pendent ambition, the natural working of unhampered 
intelligence, than it is to depend upon fiat teaching from 
a central office. There is usually no more intellect at 
the central office than there is in the schoolrooms, and 
there is never enough to go round. 

If from some mountain-top schools were made to be 
surveyed, their uniform downsittings and uprisings 
and forth-puttings would be an imposing spectaclQ. 



For Stih stance of Doch'lne. 353 

But they are made for the sole, separate advantage of 
each little mind in them, and that mind is not helped 
along the stony path of " seven times one is seven " by 
another little mind trudging along the same road a 
hundred miles off. All this military movement grati- 
ftes the grown-up officials outside the schoolhouse but 
it only grinds down and files down the growing pupil 
inside. Uniformity for any show whatever is baleful. 
it should always be kept in strict subserviency to indi- 
tddual development. What uniformity is necessary to 
(he best possible work of each pupil — that should be 
compassed. Beyond this, uniformity is a burden and a 
stumbling-block. Least of all is it to be dreaded or 
deprecated that one school differs from another school 
in glory. It is better to have each school set in the 
heart of the community, responsible to the parents, con- 
trolled by the parents, dependent upon the parents. 
It is better that parents should know and feel that what 
they do not will not be done. It would be more trouble, 
but that is what the world is made for. The fashioning 
of human character is the one object to which, so far as we 
know, all suns and systems tend. To this end the skies 
were hung, the stars were swung, the seas were hollowed, 
the soil enfertilized. What part this world may have 
in the movement of all worlds we do not yet know. 
But nothing in this world is better worth human while 
tl;an the development of the human being, the improve- 



354 -^'^^ Substance of Doctrine. 

ment of the human race. The human race is only to 
be improved through the individual. And individual 
character is chiefly set during the first fourteen years of 
life. The family is the one divine institution to cradle 
the helpless human being with the unspeakable tender- 
ness he needs. All the rest is left for man to do and to de- 
vise. We think we have discovered that all are wiser 
than any one. In local self-government the machinery 
may not run so smoothly as in absolute centralization, 
but the human being is more advantaged. It is better 
that each school district shall manage its own school in 
its own way than that any central power manage all 
schools in its way, though some district schools may suffer 
in consequence. But it-is not only wise, it is safe to trust 
the people. It is not only better that a community should 
go without a church than to have a state church forced 
upon them, but the people are as thoroughly furnished 
to good works. The gospel is preached in New Eng- 
land just as widely through individual effort as it could 
be by state command. Education left to individual am- 
bition, individual emulation, individual selfishness, would 
be just as deeply and widely and wisely pursued as now, 
when spasmodically and partially provided by the gov- 
ernment and smothered by system. Teachers left to 
their own responsibility and ingenuity would give us a 
thousand-fold better schools than such as now strut 



Por Substance of Doctrine, 355 

along in good marching order but with no other valu- 
able trait, under the superintendent's wand. 

It is not a question of modes or moods. It concerns 
the very life of the republic. We have made the daring 
and doubtful experiment of universal suffrage. With- 
out intelligence it is not even doubtful, it is certain dis- 
aster. Intelligence does not consist in drawing on 
blackboards, or standing on any list whatever, or even 
being happy in school, though it be not incompatible 
with any of these. Inte^igence con^sts in understand- 
ing the meaning of words, in knowing cause and effect, 
in discriminating between certainty and probability, in 
selecting the essential from the incidental. In the 
wake of real intelligence, character almost .inevitably 
follows. The ranks of the agrarian, the tramp, the 
thief, are not largely reinforced by those who judge 
clearly truth from error, and see distinctly the differ- 
ence between a principle which is eternal, and a temp- 
tation which is temporary and illusive. 

There is no safety against the encroachment of the 
dangerous classes except in a counter encroachment upon 
them of the intelligent classes. That encroachment 
can be compassed only by the slow and sole process 
of building up aright the mind and character of each 
boy and girl separately. It cannot be done in the 
mass. It cannot be done by the gross. It cannot be 
done by machine. It needs hand-sewing. 



356 For Substance of Doctrine, 

Socialism, communism, nihilism, are rife and rank 
abroad and already begin to lift their horrid heads a- 
mong us. Assassination is a dastardly crime, commu- 
nism is a suicidal resource ; nevertheless the communists 
and the socialists and tlfe nihilists are men, and their 
wild outbursts are it may be but the thrusts of frenzied 
agony. They suffer they know not why, but they strike 
out at the phantom which represents to them oppression, 
and the shadow deepens and darkens upon them. 

*• Yet I doubt not through the ages, one increasing pur- 
pose runs, 

And the thoughts of men arc widened bj the process of 
the suns." 

Let us in this new republic head off communism by 
becoming all communists : communists in so far as the 
republic is the common inheritance, the common bles- 
sing, the common glory ; communists not to level dis- 
tinctions but to guarantee to every human being his 
natural power to acquire, his natural right to enjoy 
distinction ; communists not to destroy property but to 
give to every human being in his infancy so much edu- 
cation and intelligence and virtue as shall enable him 
to acquire properly and to detect fraud and to resist op- 
pression. 

If the time has come when a powerful ecclesiasticism 
will marshal itself against the public school, the time 
has come for republicanism to marshal itself to defend 



imiImS,);. ^^ CONGRESS 



019 886 554 



